Procurement, Budgeting, and Oversight

Take control of major software projects by aligning your agency’s processes with modern software development practices

Why get help with procurement?

Software plays a pivotal role in the functioning of government agencies. However, traditional software procurement, budgeting, and oversight processes often lead to failure and overspending. The average government IT project costs 310% of the original price tag, with major government software projects failing a significant majority of the time. As more and more agencies rely on software to carry out their missions, taking control of the procurement process is crucial. This will not only reduce the risk of failure, but also ensure that governments retain control over its mission rather than outsourcing it along with its software contracts. 


U.S. Digital Response (USDR) has deep experience with helping agencies realign their procurement, budgeting, and oversight processes to take control over major software projects. We collaborate with your stakeholders to teach them about modern software development and procurement practices that will prioritize serving your agency’s needs.


If you need help fixing an underperforming software project or want to set up your next major software project for success, get in touch.

Selected case studies

Community Alliance with Family Farmers
Bringing User-Centered Design into the RFP Process

The Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF) wanted to build a software tool that could help schools in California purchase more nutritious, locally farmer-grown food. Yousef Buzayan, CAFF's farm to cafeteria program manager, reached out to USDR for help.

USDR provided a surge of technical expertise to complement CAFF’s experience by introducing CAFF to agile software development, product thinking, and user research, executing 18F's De-risking Guide created by USDR staff members Waldo Jaquith and Robin Carnahan when they worked together at 18F.

Read the full case study »Read more about this project »
Team members
Waldo Jaquith
Delivery Manager
,
US Digital Response
Marin County Behavioral Health & Recovery Services
Journey Map to inform new Electronic Health Records System for Marin County

Marin County’s Behavioral Health & Recovery Services reached out to USDR to partner on the overall digitization effort across their office. After learning more about their workflows, the team chose to focus on the Electronic Health Records system that the fiscal team uses to administer payments for Medi-Cal, Medicare, and Medicaid.

USDR volunteers reviewed the team's workflow, interviewed team members, documented their existing data workflow, helped them identify their weak links, gaps and sources of missed communication. From this discussion, we helped them derive a wireframe of the specification for an EHR system that they can procure to integrate the various modules and entities sharing and consuming information.

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Team members
Charles Gunyon
Senior Software Engineer
,
Paladin
Carol Whang
Senior Program Manager
,
Partners in School Innovation
Peer Power Foundation
Enabling virtual tutor training to support Tennessee’s public school students

The Peer Power Foundation is a Memphis area nonprofit that hires, trains, and pays college students to mentor and tutor middle and high school students. To counteract an estimated 1 year of learning loss among Tennessee’s 1.1M public school students, Peer Power sought to ramp up their tutoring capacity by enrolling and training tutors online.

USDR worked with the team to identify their top needs from a learning management solution and surveyed the field for the best fit.

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Team members
Anna Hoffman
UX Researcher
,
Instagram
Ashish Arte
CEO & Co-Founder
,
SURGERi.ai
City of Milwaukee Health Department
Scoring No Code Databases

In early 2021, the City of Milwaukee Health Department asked USDR for help replacing their Quickbase system. Due to licensing issues and cost, they knew that they were not getting the full utility of the tool and wanted to identify another platform that better fit their needs and budget.

In collaboration with the team, a USDR volunteer scored 8 different no code database platforms across 45 possible criteria. They ranked the tools and landed on a top choice that met the department’s HIPAA compliance and pricing requirements with high scores on user friendliness and documentation.

Read the full case study »Read more about this project »
Team members
Bindu Gakhar
Head of Products
,
Paystand
Janita Chalam
Software Engineer
,
Uber
Left
Right

Meet the team

Amy Meng
Amy is a program manager working with the Digital Delivery team to scale and operationalize USDR capabilities. She was previously Associate Director of Delivery Management at Truss, a civic tech consultancy.
Waldo Jaquith
Waldo leads USDR’s work in procurement, budgeting, and oversight of major government software projects. He previously served as Senior Advisor to the Administrator at the U.S. General Services Administration.
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