contract vehicle | The Contracting Education Academy

October 23, 2014 By AMK

Contract management continues to be a challenge at Energy

Contract management at the Energy Department continues to be a significant challenge, says an Oct. 7, 2014 DOE inspector general report.

The DOE is the most contractor-dependent civilian agency in the federal government. It awards contracts, grants and other financial assistance to industrial companies, small businesses, academic institutions and nonprofit organizations.

About 90 percent of the DOE’s budget is spent through those contracting vehicles, the report says.

The Government Accountability Office has included the DOE on it’s high-risk list since 1990 because of inadequate contract oversight.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.fiercegovernment.com/story/doe-oig-contract-management-continues-be-challenge-doe/2014-10-13

June 13, 2014 By AMK

Opening up competition in federal IT

The Public Spend Forum, a group focusing on public-sector procurement, analyzed government IT spending and found that a “check the box culture” and a broken requirements and procurement process inhibits competition and limits innovation.

Its recent report, Billions in the Balance: Removing Barriers to Competition & Driving Innovation in the Public-Sector IT Market makes several recommendations for IT managers:

Establish clear lines of authority and accountability.
Develop a simple needs and outcomes statement instead of voluminous RFPs.
Engage the market early.
Develop a cost/outcome (ROI)-focused IT strategy.
- Focus on minimizing cost/outcome as the ROI of a government program
- Implement flexible IT architectures as recommended in the ACT-IAC 7S for Success Framework.
- Emphasize prototyping and approaches for minimum viable product rollouts.
- Avoid monolithic acquisition approaches and instead leverage existing procurement vehicles and allow use of alternative vehicles.

Encourage smart risk taking.
Reduce burdensome requirements and speed up the procurement process.

Keep reading this article at: http://gcn.com/blogs/pulse/2014/06/competition-in-it-procurement-report.aspx

February 27, 2014 By AMK

5 tips for hiring federal contractors

The process of hiring a government consultant/contractor isn’t easy, and most federal leaders and managers have to do it at some point in their career. Maybe they can’t get hiring authority to bring in new people. Maybe they need to jump start a new project or program with skills that aren’t available inside their office or agency. It’s a big decision, and many managers, especially those doing it for the first time, are uncertain about how to move forward.

Here are five tips to help make federal leaders more educated buyers:

1. Take some time to think about the problem and put aside the solution for a bit.

2. Talk to a few different trusted companies.

3. Understand procurement vehicles.

4. Pay attention to the evaluation criteria and personnel qualifications.

5. Keep another company in the wings.

See the details associated with each of these five tips and read the complete article at: http://www.govexec.com/excellence/promising-practices/2014/02/5-tips-hiring-federal-contractors/78884

December 3, 2013 By AMK

DoD finalizing major rewrite of acquisition guidance

Pentagon officials are “very close” to finishing their work on an overhaul of the official guidebook to DoD’s byzantine acquisition system, and the process led them to the conclusion that they need Congress’ help to help unwind a cumbersome maze of laws that have been layered on through decades of well-intentioned reform efforts.

The document in question is officially known as DoD Instruction 5000.02 — the key collection of guidance that describes the military acquisition process. Frank Kendall, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, logistics and technology, has been working on a revamped version for months.

“I’ll be out very soon,” he said Thursday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It’s going to emphasize tailoring even more than previous editions did. And we show people multiple models of how you can structure an acquisition program depending upon what the product is. You know, at the end of the day, the way you structure the program to develop, produce and field the product depends on what the product is and what it takes to get that job done. There’s a logic and a flow that has to be consistent with what you’re trying to accomplish. And it’s definitely not a one-size-fits-all business. We do a large range of different types of things.”

That tailored approach to acquisition is consistent with the messages in the current Better Buying Power effort Kendall’s office has been leading in DoD, emphasizing that the department’s own professionals need to use their judgment to structure the right acquisition vehicle and contract type for the right job. The latest version came with the tagline: “A guide to help you think.”

Kendall says the rewrite of the instructions was needed, in part, because of several recent laws Congress has passed imposing new requirements on DoD acquisition managers. And reworking the document from scratch led his office to the conclusion that those recent legislative changes were just one more layer on a system that’s been growing in complexity for decades.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.federalnewsradio.com/65/3502073/DoD-finalizing-major-rewrite-of-acquisition-guidance

June 21, 2013 By AMK

Unraveling the facts about GWACs

Obama administration officials say there are too many IT procurement vehicles, and they want agencies to consolidate their buying around existing interagency contracts rather than launch new ones. There is even a strong case to cut back on current contracts, which officials say are often duplicative in what they provide for buyers.

Where does that leave governmentwide acquisition contracts (GWACs)?

In early 2012, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) issued rules requiring agencies that wanted to award their own multi-agency contracts (MACs) to submit a business case arguing why those contracts were necessary — something agencies that wanted to award GWACs have had to do for years.

“Agencies are required to balance the value of creating a new contract against the benefit of using an existing one, and whether the expected return on investment is worth the taxpayer resources,” said Dan Gordon, who was OFPP administrator at the time.

Following the 1996 Clinger-Cohen Act that authorized their creation, GWACs became a poster child of sorts for that kind of contract inflation. Many agencies were looking to create their own contracts as testimony to their procurement mojo in an era of huge growth in government IT acquisition. For vendors, GWACs were seen as a hunting license to pursue lucrative government IT business.

Keep reading this article at: http://fcw.com/articles/2013/06/07/feature-gwac-facts.aspx

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