Workday Wins, Then Loses, Contract With Us Office For Personnel Management

The agency gave nary logic for cancelling nan statement aft conscionable 1 week, though its first grant was wide criticized.

Workday won a statement to switch nan HR systems astatine nan US Office for Personnel Management (OPM) — and past a fewer days later it mislaid it, contempt having nary competition.

Two words connected nan US government’s System for Award Management (SAM) website put an extremity to nan short-lived azygous root contract: “canceled justification.”

The contract, awarded connected May 2 without a vendor bidding process, and cancelled connected May 9, would person been for 12 months of services including halfway HR processing, payroll and benefits integration pinch audit-ready reporting, clip and attendance tracking, talent acquisition and capacity management, and compliance pinch federal-specific requirements specified arsenic FedRAMP, Title 5, physics SF-52 routing, and audit trails. Compatibility pinch existing national IT systems besides figured successful nan requirements.

The implementation was to beryllium complete wrong 90 days.

At conscionable $342,200 it was a comparatively mini contract, but it could person led to a larger 1 fixed nan services OPM provides to different authorities departments via its existent system.

Operational failures

In its justification archive for nan original statement grant on SAM, OPM said, “A sole-source grant to Workday is basal owed to an urgent confluence of operational failures and binding national mandates that require contiguous action. OPM’s fragmented and outdated HR systems person reached a captious nonaccomplishment point, resulting successful payroll errors, benefits disruptions, and a manual workload that is nary longer sustainable.”

OPM utilized nan archive to take sides its determination to grant nan statement without a competition, saying, “This acquisition is not nan consequence of mediocre planning, but alternatively a consequence to an unanticipated acceleration of operational crises and federally imposed deadlines. Workday is nan only responsible root tin of delivering nan required capabilities wrong nan clip available, and afloat and unfastened title pinch different vendors would consequence successful unacceptable delays, noncompliance, and ngo failure.”

At nan extremity of nan statement period, OPM said, it intended to behaviour a “full and unfastened competition,” though it added that this would only hap “if nary justifiable sole-source information exists.”

Rule of law

The statement grant drew disapproval from existent and erstwhile labor of OPM, Reuters reported, arsenic good arsenic from nan Information Technology Acquisition Advisory Council, which makes recommendations to amended national IT contracting.

IT-AAC head John Weiler thanked nan OPM “for upholding nan norm of rule and taking corrective action” successful a post connected LinkedIn, adding, “OPM escaped a bruising protestation that would person further delayed its HR modernization journey. Hopefully this is simply a instruction for others looking for shortcuts that nan norm of rule is not nan problem. It’s really we implement!”

Asked astir nan statement cancellation, a Workday typical would only opportunity that nan institution “remains committed to supporting nan national authorities pinch its HR modernization efforts.”

The OPM did not respond to a petition for remark by publication time.