GWAC | The Contracting Education Academy

June 28, 2011 By AMK

GSA blames poor wording for STARS contract snafu

The General Services Administration is blaming “ambigous” language in an email to bidders on its $10 billion 8(a) contract for giving the mistake impression that it had made contract awards.

The email was intended to give notice that GSA was extending the selection process for the Streamlined Technology Acquisition Resources for Services (STARS) II governmentwide acquisition contract, according to a statement made June 23 by Mary Davie, assistant Federal Acquisition Service commissioner for integrated technology service at GSA.

Davie said the agency intends to award its major governmentwide small-business IT contract by the end of July, although it may have caused some confusion about awards.

GSA asked for a monthlong extension to try to get better prices from the companies bidding on its five-year, $10 billion contract. But because of the language issues some companies believe they had a spot on the IT GWAC and then lost it, Davie said.

A first correspondence, sent June 1, intended to say that officials, who are reviewing bids for STARS II, were continuing their review of submissions. The second letter, sent June 21, gave companies an opportunity for written discussions and called for a final proposal and pricing revision, Davie wrote.

“The second letter did specifically rescind a portion of earlier communications, which appeared to indicate that offerors were considered to be ‘apparently successful.’ This phrasing was ambiguous and should not have been used in these communications,” Davie said.

That second e-mail message, sent to companies, states: “Any part of previous communications from GSA stating or implying that offerors were deemed apparently successful is hereby rescinded.”

GSA was giving the small businesses time to re-examine the prices they offered in their initial bid proposals and adjust the pricing to “amplify its potential to be favorably considered,” the second message also states. Officials included the median price and prices in the 25th percentile as a guide for companies to make their revisions.

GSA had to get the extension to get better prices, Davie said.

“It would not have been possible to ask for more competitive pricing without going back to offerors to ask for an extension, provide them with an opportunity for additional discussions, and then request a final proposal revision,” Davie said.

She added that GSA’s GWAC program office is responding to contractors’ questions as part of the written discussions.

Although GSA’s follow-up message may be awkward, Larry Allen, president of Allen Federal Business Partners, said it’s better than being criticized throughout the life of the contract because of high prices.

About the Author: Matthew Weigelt is acquisition editor for Federal Computer Week – June 24, 2011 at http://washingtontechnology.com/articles/2011/06/24/gsa-stars-ii-gwac-davie-ambiguous.aspx?s=wtdaily_270611

June 25, 2011 By AMK

Oops, GSA takes back major contract awards

General Services Administration officials quickly rescinded an e-mail message sent to small businesses telling them they had won spots on its major small business governmentwide IT contract, according to an e-mail message obtained by Washington Technology and Federal Computer Week.

Officials wrote in a follow-up message, which came a day after the award notice, that they were checking prices again for the 8(a) Streamlined Technology Acquisition Resources for Services (STARS) II contract. The message contained an unsubtle suggestion that bidders might want to offer lower prices.

“Any part of previous communications from GSA stating or implying that offerors were deemed apparently successful is hereby rescinded,” agency officials wrote. “This discussion e-mail serves as notice that GSA has made the decision to hold additional discussions, with an emphasis on pricing.”

STARS II is a 5-year, $10 billion indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) IT contract. GSA issued the first solicitation for the GWAC in July 2009. Officials expect an award this month, according to GSA.gov.

GSA officials didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment..

Prices are becoming a central theme in the government as Congress and the Obama administration attempte to rein in spending.

GSA is giving the 8(a) small businesses time to reexamine the prices they offered in their initial bids and adjust the pricing to “amplify its potential to be favorably considered,” according to the follow-up message.

The opportunity for price revisions is not merely a request for an update, but it will play into GSA’s evaluations.

“This is a competitive 8(a) procurement where comparative analysis with other offerors’ pricing in response to this [Final Proposal Revision] opportunity, and possibly other price analysis, will occur in order to assess price reasonableness [or] unreasonableness,” GSA wrote.

In the rescission e-mail message, GSA gave companies pricing averages from the initial bids as a guide for what’s been offered so far to let companies know where their prices compare to other bidders.

Observers speculated that someone may have sent out an email too soon, or a senior management official could have recognized in the 12th hour that the agency needed look over the prices again.

“Oops,” Larry Allen, president of Allen Federal Business Partners, said about the initial message.

Either way, the STARS GWAC is “a crown jewel” of GSA and its small business contracts. It’s next to the GSA’s Schedules in importance to the agency, he said.

The follow-up rescission message may be awkward, but, Allen said, it’s better than being criticized throughout the life of the contract because of high prices.

Nevertheless, the small-business aspect, such as getting a good mix of various business types, likely would get officials’ attention from the outset before prices, he said. STARS offers customer agencies an avenue to boost their small-business contacting percentages, which has helped to make the GWAC successful.

Across the government though, pricing has become another essential topic in a time when funding is set to diminish. It’s important enough that the Defense Department made Shay Assad, a senior procurement policy official, the first director of defense pricing in May.

That appointment points to the weight of the pricing issue, said Hope Lane, a government contract consultant at Aronson Consulting.

“The government has to start implementing austerity measures,” said Lane, who focuses on GSA Schedules.

It isn’t surprising that GSA may have rescinded its award notice in order to make contractors improve their prices, she said. As agencies hunt for the best value for their money, GSA’s STARS GWAC has to prove that it can actually save money, or GSA will lose business to another IDIQ hosted by another agency, she said.

“IT, in particular, is a competitive market among GWACs,” she said.

This mix-up may cost GSA by way of protests to the contract. Allen said the likelihood of protests just jumped much higher.

About the Author: Matthew Weigelt is acquisition editor for Federal Computer Week – June 22, 2011 – http://washingtontechnology.com/Articles/2011/06/22/GSA-rescinds-STARS-II-GWAC-award.aspx?p=1

May 2, 2011 By AMK

GSA’s Mary Davie urges ‘doing things differently’ in acquisition

Federal acquisition officials should be ready to do things differently, take some risks and use new tools such as social networks and wikis to help advance federal procurement goals, Mary Davie, an assistant commissioner at the General Services Administration, said at the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Summit.

“People may laugh at social media and say it’s just playing,” Davie, assistant commissioner for the GSA’s Office of Integrated Technology Services, said at the summit on April 26. “But for me, with tools such as GovLoop, Twitter and LinkedIn, I connect with people with expertise that I otherwise would not have known.”

With budget and political pressures on the federal acquisition workforce, Davie urged a conference room full of federal procurement executives to innovate to improve efficiency and to expand the ways in which they share information and expertise with each other. She encouraged them to seek help from GSA and other agencies with specialized expertise as well.

“People want to come together and talk, especially us acquisition types,” Davie said. “At GSA, we support a lot of different agencies. Yet we all have the same challenges and struggle with the same things.”

“We need to collaborate more, not just with industry, but with each other,” Davie said.

Davie commended the federal employees for doing “a fantastic job” under stressful conditions. At the same time, she encouraged the federal procurement staffers to innovate and “do things differently.”

“I believe in taking a little bit of risk and doing things differently,” Davie said. “If we don’t start to do things differently, we are never going to advance.”

As an example, she cited GSA’s recent experiment with a public procurement wiki for the Better Buy acquisition to seek open-ended comments from industry.

Davie also invited the procurement officials to consider making purchases through governmentwide acquisition vehicles available through agencies such as GSA, NASA, the Interior Department and the Defense Information Systems Agency.

Smaller agencies struggling with IT procurements may find assisted acquisitions especially helpful, she said.

“There are contracts available for folks to use,” Davie said. “I would say, with the contracts available around government, we could solve 90 percent of our problems.”

— by Alice Lipowicz – Federal Computer Week – Apr. 26, 2011 – at http://www.google.com/url?sa=X&q=http://fcw.com/articles/2011/04/26/gsa-mary-davie-acquisition-reform-advice.aspx&ct=ga&cad=CAcQAhgBIAAoATABOAFA9ezg7QRIAVgBYgVlbi1VUw&cd=pW59c-UuoS8&usg=AFQjCNG4Hrtrd45PpXs9EJYBSLrtbCAiSw – 1105 Media, FCW’s owner, produced the summit.

April 20, 2011 By AMK

SmartBuy FAR rule dead at age 4

Long dormant federal efforts to codify a requirement for contracting officers to consider governmentwide enterprise agreements when buying software died a quiet death earlier this year.

A proposed change to the Federal Acquisition Regulation published for public comment in 2007 would have required civilian contracting officers to consider buying software through the General Services Administration’s SmartBuy initiative or the Defense Department’s Enterprise Software Initiative. Both efforts have blanket purchase agreements with some software publishers, the idea being for vendors to give their lowest price possible in exchange for access to a Defense- or government-wide market.

In recent years, some government and former government officials have privately said neither effort has lived up to its promise, while software publishers have complained that oversight associated with signing an agreement is intrusive and the margins too low to justify participation.

In an April 18 list of closed FAR proposals–closed whether because the change was accepted or rejected–the SmartBuy case is listed as “closed at the direction of the FAR Principals.” The language the case proposed has not been incorporated into the FAR.

Closure of the case does not affect Defense Department contracting officials, who are already required under DFARS 208.74 to purchase through the Enterprise Software Initiative if (according to PGI 208.7403 [5]) its terms, conditions and prices “represent the best value.” The ESI also added commodity hardware, such as laptops and printers, to its roster of products in November 2010.

SmartBuy in particular attracted some high-profile publishers in the initial years after its creation in 2003. Most notably, Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) signed a SmartBuy agreement in 2005 after some years-long behind the scenes maneuvering that some officials say included sale staff from the notoriously hardball software firm attempting to dissuade agency officials from utilizing SmartBuy.

The General Services Administration may have spurred the Oracle deal after it told other agencies in 2005 to cease purchasing Oracle licenses unless through SmartBuy, which they said at the time would be signed shortly–a fact that some industry officials at the time disputed.

– Published on FierceGovernmentIT (http://www.fiercegovernmentit.com/) – Apr. 19, 2011 – 10:09pm

For more:
– download the April 18 list of closed FAR cases (.pdf)
– download the 2007 proposed SmartBuy FAR rule (.pdf)

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