acquisition reform | The Contracting Education Academy

December 10, 2020 By cs

Creating an infrastructure for procurement innovation at DHS

Setting up the Department of Homeland Security’s Procurement Innovation Lab (PIL) was one of the first things Soraya Correa did after becoming DHS chief procurement officer in 2015.

It originally had one half of one full-time employee, and the lab reported to her. Polly Hall, the PIL’s current director, came to the lab in 2017 from having worked as a contracting officer on a Transportation Security Administration procurement where she had been trying to think about new techniques for doing advisory downselects. Since then the PIL has grown to a full-time staff of six, and most DHS components also have an acquisition innovation advisor (not a full-time position) who acts as a sort of local representative for what the PIL and Correa were trying to do.

With the PIL’s own staff and the acquisition innovation advisors in the components, DHS arguably has established more of an ongoing innovation capacity than any other federal agency. Correa and her colleagues are institutionalizing innovation, something we rarely see in the government.

The PIL’s operating principle is not to force itself on DHS contracting people. It is not a tiger team that swoops in and takes over a procurement. PIL staffers come in only when asked by the people doing the procurement – both program and contracting people. They provide advice to the frontline folks, and those employees then do the work. For projects being supported, staff from the PIL meet with their contracting customers every other week for 15 minutes until the contract or task order is awarded.

Keep reading this article at: https://fcw.com/blogs/lectern/2020/11/kelman-dis-pil-innovations.aspx

November 17, 2020 By cs

DoD’s Space Development Agency shows how fast the FAR can be

When it came time for the brand new DoD modernization organization charged with rapidly innovating in the space domain to award one of its first big contracts, you might expect they’d turn to a new, en-vogue acquisition mechanism like other transaction agreements (OTA) or middle-tier acquisition.

If so, you’d be wrong.

DoD’s new Space Development Agency is showing that the boring old processes embedded in the Federal Acquisition Regulation don’t have to be synonymous with slowness. Late last month, SDA awarded a somewhat complex systems integration contract to help build the first elements of a brand new architecture of low-Earth orbit satellites. The total time from final request for proposals to contract award: three-and-half months.

“There was nothing magic about our contracting approach. We found that the FAR is actually quite flexible and useful to get things done,” Ryan Frigm, SDA’s deputy director said in an interview for Federal News Network’s On DoD. “The reason we were able to be successful is because we have a very talented, dedicated and motivated team that shares a singular focus, which is being the department’s constructive disrupter for space. And the team knows that we need to get space capabilities out to the warfighter at the speed of need.”

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/on-dod/2020/11/dods-space-development-agency-shows-how-fast-the-far-can-be/

November 2, 2020 By cs

Staffing government procurement in the 21st century

In America’s public and private sectors today, just about everything which has not yet become digital is well along its way toward becoming so.

Retail, healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, social services, defense and even agriculture, have all become dependent on streams of data for their managers to analyze and use in making decisions — decisions that typically turn out better than those based on past experience, intuition or seat-of-the-pants reckoning alone.

That can be a good thing.

But for long-serving members of the workforce, it’s also an uncomfortable change. Back when veteran employees began their careers, data was the province of IT departments, and it didn’t have that much to do with the organization’s routine operations.

Now it does.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.federaltimes.com/thought-leadership/2020/10/16/staffing-government-procurement-in-the-21st-century/

October 30, 2020 By cs

GAO: DHS chief acquisition officer must improve vetting of components’ procurement executives

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released a report stating that the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) chief acquisition officer needs to improve the assessment of DHS units’ component acquisition executives (CAE).

In its report, GAO says that the DHS chief acquisition officer selects CAEs that handle DHS components’ acquisition-related policies, workforce, data collection and reporting functions.

Components such as the U.S. Coast Guard, Transportation Security Administration (TSA), Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office (CWMD) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have implemented CAE vetting procedures, according to GAO.

However, the watchdog said that four out of five CAEs in the DHS Management Directorate, including three acting CAEs, “have not been subjected to this process.”

Keep reading this article at: https://www.executivegov.com/2020/10/gao-dhs-chief-acquisition-officer-must-improve-vetting-of-components-procurement-executives/

October 28, 2020 By cs

IRS, Army using automation to cut hours out of the acquisition process

Just about a year ago, Office of Federal Procurement Policy Administrator Dr. Michael Wooten unveiled what likely will be his signature priority — removing friction from the acquisition process.

While many in industry privately mock and question what that concept or phrase really means, it’s clear that frictionless acquisition will lean heavily on robotics process automation (RPA) and other initiatives to lessen the burden on contracting officers.

That became abundantly clear during the ACT-IAC Acquisition Excellence conference a couple weeks ago.

Not only did Wooten continue to message this now governmentwide goal, he also offered some real life examples of what the future could look like.

One of those efforts focuses on reducing procurement administrative lead time (PALT).

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/reporters-notebook-jason-miller/2020/10/irs-army-using-automation-to-cut-hours-out-of-the-acquisition-process/

Setting up the Department of Homeland Security’s Procurement Innovation Lab (PIL) was one of the first things Soraya Correa did after becoming DHS chief procurement officer in 2015.

When it came time for the brand new DoD modernization organization charged with rapidly innovating in the space domain to award one of its first big contracts, you might expect they’d turn to a new, en-vogue acquisition mechanism like other transaction agreements (OTA) or middle-tier acquisition.

In America’s public and private sectors today, just about everything which has not yet become digital is well along its way toward becoming so.

Just about a year ago, Office of Federal Procurement Policy Administrator Dr. Michael Wooten unveiled what likely will be his signature priority — removing friction from the acquisition process.

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