Let's talk about how government procures the services of software development teams.

There's a pernicious belief that a vendor's dev teams need to be sitting in your building, every day, 9–5. This feels right in terms of oversight, but is in fact extremely expensive and bad.

The best developers do not happen to live in commuting distance around your agency's building. That's shocking, I know. Your agency's offices are probably in a state or federal capital, so you're paying really high rates (because cost of living) for mediocre devs.

Here's a rule of thumb: a scrum team costs $1M/year. A scrum team that's located where your agency is, working on-site? That's $2M/year (not including the costs of providing them with space to work, etc.)

Do you *really* want to pay twice as much for the same thing?

I'll also add that the best devs (by which I mean programmers, designers, user researchers, etc. — anybody who can be on a scrum team) are not gonna agree to up and start working in a new place, with a new commuting pattern, for months or years.

There is *huge* variation in cost of living throughout a state. I live in rural central Virginia. My mortgage is just over a grand each month. I couldn't rent a one-bedroom apartment for that in northern Virginia. As a result, I can work for less money.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics provides state-level wage information for software developers that shows that the difference between the most expensive developers (Washington state) and the least expensive (Puerto Rico) is a 150% wage gap! https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151132.htm#IDX701

If you don't care where in the state or even the country a team is — if they're scattered all around the country — then you can reduce the cost of your software project by 50%, *and* get far better developers. That's amazing! Everybody should do this!

It wasn't clear to me how to accelerate this change, but now I'm hopeful that Covid will make this approach the norm, rather than the exception. (Ain't no vendor teams working on site now. ...right? )

Government spends billions on custom software annually. Allowing distributed teams will result in a big chunk of that going to the rural areas where many Americans live. That's economic development that can have some real impact.

In conclusion: normalize distributed vendor teams, stop insisting that they park themselves in your office, and get better results for a lot less money.