RESTON, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Octo Consulting Group (Octo), an award-winning provider of technology and digital services to the federal government, today announced that it has been awarded a five year $20 million Enterprise Transformation blanket purchase agreement (BPA) by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). In addition, Octo won a $1.5M task order under the BPA to provide enterprise-level coaching, transform enterprise process and policies, develop and deliver training, and provide hands-on agile coaching for CMS programs.
CMS is responsible for providing access to affordable high quality healthcare and processing claims for a multitude of programs. To do its work, the agency began to streamline its business processes to more carefully manage the agency’s IT investments and leverage agile methodologies to quickly build and deploy applications and systems that can effectively respond to the rapidly changing healthcare landscape.
Octo has been working with CMS to create the foundational elements of the agency’s agile transformation and lay the ground work for this BPA. Over the past year, Octo has assisted CMS stand up the Center for Enterprise Agility (CEA), built a repository of foundational agile materials and developed an Agile Immersion course, all critical components of laying the groundwork for agency-wide agile adoption.
"We’re honored that our work over the past year has given the agency the needed foundation to drive its modernization and transformation objectives,” said Jay Shah, Executive Vice President, Octo. “We have seen the impact that CEA has already had in developing, enhancing, and sharing scalable and reusable agile practices and we’re committed to continuing to help CMS drive agile throughout the entire agency as well as critical programs like the Medicare Access & CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA).”
Octo will be working with the Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer divisions within the agency to establish enterprise-level guidance and transform enterprise processes. In addition, the Octo team will be working directly with CMS programs to support adoption of agile processes and delivery.
Agile is at the core of all of Octo's customer engagement. Octo has previously implemented its Agile CoE's at United States Patent and Trade Office (USPTO) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and has had numerous agile engagements at other federal agencies such as the National Institute of Health (NIH), National Geospatial Agency (NGA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Octo is certified to use the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) for its agile development and training engagements, which is an industry recognized standard for agile methodologies.
The period of performance for the BPA is five years with a $20 million ceiling while the task order is two years with a total contract value of nearly $1.5 million.
Octo is an industry-leading, award-winning provider of digital services for the Federal Government. Octo specializes in providing agile software development, user experience design, and cloud engineering services that address the government’s most pressing missions and modernization challenges.
Octo is one of only 11 private companies in the United States to have been appraised at CMMI® Level 4 for Software Development Maturity (CMMI-DEV constellation). In addition, Octo also maintains ISO 9001:2008, ISO 20000:2013, and ISO 27001:2013 certifications and is one of only seven government contractors that is a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) Gold Partner: an industry-accepted framework for developing software applications using Agile development principles.
Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, Octo has additional offices in Alexandria, Virginia and Columbia, Maryland.