Pricing federal services
Research
Production
Key result
Working prototype advanced an AI startup to the next round of bidding for a $1m federal contract.
The prototype I designed won AI-powered startup AI4Govt a large project with the IRS, launching their business and paving the way for future government projects.
By analyzing and normalizing information from a variety of governmental databases, the software predicts the price of professional services. This helps procurers determine a fair and reasonable price, and spend taxpayer money as efficiently as possible.
Research
Understanding how pricing is procured
Interviews
To understand how federal procurers think about pricing, I conducted six 30–60 minute interviews:
3
Contracting officers
1
Contract specialist
2
Project managers
1
Contracting officer representative
Org chart
User flow
Stakeholder goals
Speed
Reduce acquisition lead-times
Increase customer self-service
Faster decision-making
Quality
Increased trust from business partners
Smarter decision-making
A vision for the the future
Comparative analysis
I drew from existing cost estimation tools across the federal government, as well as common approaches to visualizing location-based data.
Production
Winning the bid
Users select which databases they want to draw from, specify location, project year-over-year inflation, and set the term. They’re provided the average hourly rate for the work, plus standard deviations and min/max values. They can also explore the individual records on which the calculations were based (second image).
Meeting IRS standards
Tabletop testing conducted by an IRS project manager and IT specialist earned a 3.7/5 rating across six criteria, enough to meet IRS requirements and win AI4GOVT a contract to develop the prototype into a complete application.
