Dana, that procurement plan is designed to keep VA from repeating the mistakes they made in the '60's, and it probably will. Having sold over a billion dollars of federal software and implementations and then building and selling an open source software company, I can say that the fulfillment paradigm is completely different.
With enterprise implementations, it was always, "Freeze the requirements! We'll be back in 2months, 6months, 2 years with what we thought you wanted." And the misses and stupidity were truly monumental. What I have seen of open source development has been adjusting mature code to fit requirements, weekly progress, and both requirements and development are dynamic, kinda like the real world. That's different to buy and manage, will require different customer skills, but since the ship has largely sailed on "shut up and wait" development, perhaps the importance and definition of learning how to be successful should be part of the response.
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