OFPP brings no predisposed notions to strategic sourcing

April 26, 2013 by

The Strategic Sourcing Leadership Council delivered a set of proposals for how and where to expand the Federal Strategic Sourcing Initiative.

But not every suggestion sent to the Office of Federal Procurement Policy in March was about a new contract or expanding a current blanket purchase agreement.

Joe Jordan, the administrator of OFPP, said the council wants to move forward with a number strategic sourcing efforts, including technology hardware and software, laboratory supplies, janitorial and sanitation, mobile and wireless products and services and others.

“We are now working with them to say ‘what is the solution?’ It doesn’t mean in all those categories, there is one governmentwide contract,” Jordan said, after a panel discussion on strategic sourcing at an event sponsored by the Coalition for Government Procurement in Arlington, Va. Wednesday. “We are putting all that commodity under management with an executive agent that has a deep content knowledge and all of the large buyers at the table, along with the Small Business Administration, to figure out what the right solution is. In some cases, it will mean reduced contract duplication, better leveraging our spend and driving volume based discounts. In other cases, it’s more terms and conditions and taking administrative costs out of the approach.”

Keep reading this article at: http://www.federalnewsradio.com/517/3290214/OFPP-brings-no-predisposed-notions-to-strategic-sourcing

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Procurement chief: Measure contractor performance

April 25, 2013 by

Joe Jordan, the top White House procurement official, recently told a gathering of government officials and contractors how he and his wife sometimes travel to New England and look for places to stay along the way. He wasn’t giving travel advice, though.

The remarks, delivered at an acquisition conference in Washington, aimed to highlight a way the government can improve how it does business.

“It really bothers me at a personal, visceral level that when I look for a bed and breakfast because my wife and I are going away for the weekend, I have vastly more descriptive information … about the quality of bed and breakfasts within a three-hour drive of D.C. than what many agencies have when they answer to a $20 million IT services contract,” Jordan said. “That’s ridiculous.”

Keep reading this article at: http://www.federaltimes.com/article/20130417/IT03/304170004/Procurement-chief-Measure-contractor-performance?odyssey=nav%7Chead 

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Federal acquisition executives grapple with retirement wave

April 24, 2013 by

As the government’s largest buyer, the Defense Department is building up expertise in its acquisition workforce, with perhaps with greater success than some other agencies in this era of contract austerity, the exception likely coming at the most senior executive level.

So said Shay Assad, director of defense pricing, defense procurement and acquisition policy, on Wednesday (Apr. 17, 2013) speaking before an Arlington, Va., audience of contractors in the Coalition for Government Procurement. His own section of the Pentagon, despite the pay freeze and likely furloughs, he said, “has done remarkably well” in retaining talent, with employees who’ve moved on “only in the single digits, mostly because either they decided we weren’t right for them or they weren’t right for us.”

Keep reading this article at: http://www.govexec.com/contracting/2013/04/federal-acquisition-executives-grapple-retirement-wave/62606/?oref=river

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Agencies brace for exodus of contracting professionals

April 8, 2013 by

Agencies are bracing for what could be a mass exodus of seasoned federal contracting professionals.

Of the government’s 36,208 acquisition professionals, 13 percent — or 4,611 — are eligible to retire, according to 2012 data from the Office of Personnel Management. Another 6,386 employees, 18 percent of the workforce, are eligible to retire in one to five years.

At agencies with smaller staffs, such as the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board and Small Business Administration, those percentages are much higher.

“Our challenge is we don’t have a crystal ball … to know how many are going to retire next year versus the year after,” said Jan Frye, the deputy assistant secretary for acquisition and logistics at the Veterans Affairs Department. “We certainly have to plan on a good share of our workforce, and these are all seasoned people … departing in the next year or two.”

The number of retiring acquisition professionals jumped from 805 in 2009 to 1,239 in 2012, according to OPM’s FedScope site.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.federaltimes.com/article/20130403/ACQUISITION02/304030001/Agencies-brace-exodus-contracting-professionals?odyssey=nav%7Chead

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Are we headed for an acquisition brain drain?

March 29, 2013 by

The top federal procurement officer on Mar. 21, 2013 called for “not a tweak but a full rethink” of the government’s planning for its acquisition workforce, warning that as many as 40 percent of the 36,000 federal contracting officers could retire in the next five years.

Joe Jordan, administrator of the White House Office of Federal Procurement Policy, compared the coming brain drain to water flowing out of a “giant bathtub,” saying he plans to push agencies to “widen the aperture of who they recruit.”

Hiring managers should sell their agencies “as a good place to work for anyone who is smart and wants to serve” and then train them at facilities such as the Federal Acquisition Institute, Jordan told an audience of vendors and agency staff at the “Acquisition Excellence” conference hosted jointly by the American Council for Technology-Industry Advisory Council and the General Services Administration. “Retaining these people in an era of continuing resolutions and pay freezes is a real challenge.”

Keep reading this article at: http://www.govexec.com/contracting/2013/03/are-we-headed-acquisition-brain-drain/62011/?oref=dropdown

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Sharing contractor performance data in eight easy steps

March 27, 2013 by

The Obama administration is pressing the acquisition workforce to get better at telling other agencies, through a governmentwide online performance database, how well contractors do their jobs.

Joe Jordan, administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, wants to improve the quantity and quality of data agencies put into the Federal Award Performance and Integrity Information System (FAPIIS).

FAPIIS is the foundation for good data, Jordan stressed in the memo, dated March 6.

“However, ” he added, “agencies must increase their use of these tools, as underreporting performance information leaves the government vulnerable to poor acquisition outcomes in the future.”

Keep reading this article at: http://fcw.com/articles/2013/03/18/contractor-performance-data.aspx 

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OFPP tells agencies to get serious about tracking contractor performance

March 25, 2013 by

The Office of Federal Procurement Policy is attempting, for a third time, to get  agencies to use the Past Performance Information Retrieval System (PPIRS) more  consistently.

So instead of asking and encouraging, OFPP Administrator Joe Jordan is setting  specific goals for agencies.

In a new memo to chief acquisition officers and  senior procurement executives, Jordan sets three-year targets for agencies to  enter vendor-performance information into the governmentwide database.

This year, the goals vary depending on how often the agency is currently entering  data into PPIRS. For instance, departments inputting data for 60 percent or more  of their contracts, must improve to 85 percent by Sept. 30. For agencies using  PPIRS 30 percent to 60 percent of the time, their goal now is 75  percent. And for those agencies using PPIRS less than 30 percent of the time,  their goal is 65 percent.

“This required contract-administration duty can significantly reduce the risk to  the government on future awards, so agencies must take bold steps to ensure that  all critical performance information is made available in the Past Performance  Information Retrieval System (PPIRS) in a timely manner, and to the maximum extent  practicable, eliminate duplicative, paper-based past performance evaluation  surveys generated outside these systems,” Jordan wrote.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.federalnewsradio.com/517/3247234/OFPP-tells-agencies-to-get-serious-about-tracking-contractor-performance

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Bid protests are worth their costs, former OFPP chief says

March 20, 2013 by

Contractors on the losing side of a competitive bidding who protest to the Government Accountability Office do not hurt or game the procurement system as some critics allege, says a forthcoming study.

The percentage of contracts that spark protests is also comparatively small, while the overall impact of the protest procedure is healthy, according to Dan Gordon, the former Obama administration head of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy and now associate dean for government procurement law studies at George Washington University Law School.

In an article set for publication this spring in the Public Contract Law Journal, a copy of which was provided to Government Executive, Gordon wrote that “there exist a number of misperceptions concerning bid protest statistics that deserve attention, because these misperceptions can taint judgments about the benefits and costs of protests. In particular, even people quite familiar with the federal acquisition system often believe that protests are more common than they really are, and they believe, inaccurately, that protesters use the protest process as a business tactic to obtain contracts from the government.”

Keep reading this article at: http://www.govexec.com/contracting/2013/03/bid-protests-are-worth-their-costs-ex-procurement-chief-says/61827/?oref=govexec_today_nl

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OFPP chief not satisfied with small business contracting achievements

February 19, 2013 by

Joe Jordan is working to build the right supplier base for the federal government, which includes paying a lot of attention to small businesses, he said. But agencies will have a hard time meeting the contracting goals for those companies because they have been living in budgetary limbo for so long, he added.

“I will not declare victory until we’re at or above the 23 percent” annual small-business contracting goal and meeting the goals for specific socioeconomic categories of small businesses, said Jordan, administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP), during a speech at the Coalition for Government Procurement’s Strategic Sourcing Forum on Jan. 31.

Keep reading this article at: http://fcw.com/articles/2013/02/06/small-business-goals.aspx.

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OFPP chief: Government shops as if it were ‘130 mid-sized businesses’

February 6, 2013 by

The government lacks solid information on past prices paid under goods and services contracts, the nation’s top procurement officer said Thursday. This is just one of the reasons he gave for the Obama administration’s push for greater use of strategic sourcing.

“I know everyone buys podiums and tables and microphones, but currently you can’t just look at who bought it how much was paid because you get a general description bucket of goods, and not level-three price data,” said Joe Jordan, administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, at a panel put on by the Professional Services Council, a contractors trade group.

“We don’t need to touch the wonderful 2,200-page [Federal Acquisition Regulation] for agencies to share what’s been paid,” Jordan said. “Our government is the largest purchaser in the world, but it buys as if it were 130 mid-sized businesses. We’ve got to leverage our buying power.”

Keep reading this article at: http://www.govexec.com/contracting/2013/02/procurement-chief-government-shops-if-it-were-130-mid-sized-businesses/61037/?oref=dropdown.

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