mission | The Contracting Education Academy

August 25, 2020 By cs

4 lessons from SBA’s $30 million ‘Certify’ platform debacle

Let me know if you’ve heard this one before: An agency hires “experts” to develop an application, spends tens of millions of dollars and the effort falls flat.

This easily could be the story to focus on with Small Business Administration’s Certify.SBA.gov project.

A recent agency inspector general report found the agency brought in U.S. Digital Service experts, spent upwards of $30 million over the last five years to develop the platform only for most of the effort to go to scrap and forcing SBA to basically start over again.

Instead this is a story about perseverance. It’s a story about lessons learned that every agency should keep in mind. And this is a story that offers an inside view into why federal projects do fail and how simple steps could change the direction of any IT project.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/reporters-notebook-jason-miller/2020/08/4-lessons-from-sbas-30m-certify-platform-debacle/

January 20, 2020 By cs

At a crossroads: Federal acquisition must evolve more rapidly

Let’s just state the obvious — agency contracting officers and other acquisition professionals jobs aren’t getting any easier, anytime soon.

Before you say, “Thanks for nothing,” the National Contract Management Association believes there is plenty of light at the end of the tunnel.

Kraig Conrad, the CEO of NCMA, said a new survey of federal acquisition professionals gives his organization’s members plenty of hope that the acquisition workforce will see some burden relief in the coming years.

“We are at a crossroads,” Conrad said in an interview at the recent Government Contract Management Symposium in Arlington, Virginia. “What we do next will be very important given the changes that are coming in the profession.”

Through the survey, which polled federal senior procurement executives and chief acquisition officers, NCMA came away with three main findings that helps answer the question of what they can do next to bolster and evolve the federal acquisition workforce.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/acquisition-policy/2020/01/at-a-crossroads-federal-acquisition-must-evolve-more-rapidly/

October 28, 2019 By cs

How ‘night court’ will impact the Pentagon’s acquisition office

When U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper launched a review this summer of the departmentwide offices known as the “fourth estate,” he made it clear that everything, including cuts to programs and personnel, were on the table.

Two months into that review, clear themes have emerged, according to Pentagon acquisition head Ellen Lord: Esper isn’t looking to cut just to cut, and if offices aren’t tied directly into war-fighting needs, they may no longer belong in the Department of Defense.

Speaking on a panel at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference last Monday, Lord said several of her offices, including the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and the Defense Acquisition University, have gone through the review process.

“What we’ve seen there is more, perhaps, a pushing back of certain functions to either services or to intel,” Lord said. “Where I’ve seen a question of actually cutting the workforce is non-true DoD missions. As we’ve gone through a lot of the different areas, if it isn’t war fighting, if it’s something that one of the other agencies or the other departments across government has asked us to do, or if it’s something that should be a function of another department because it’s not about lethality, it will get cut.”

Keep reading this article at: https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/ausa/2019/10/15/how-night-court-will-impact-the-pentagons-acquisition-office

July 25, 2014 By AMK

Government’s biggest failures: 2001-2014

With scandals at agencies ranging from the IRS to the Veterans Affairs Department fresh in the public’s mind, a longtime scholar of federal management has published a new assessment of government’s failures since 2001.

In the paper, called A Cascade of Failures: Why Government Fails, and How to Stop It, Paul C. Light, the Paulette Goddard Professor of Public Service at New York University, examines 41 stories that resonated with the public in a major way, using the Pew Research Center’s News Interest Index as a yardstick. The nonpartisan index, which has been published since 1986, attempts to measure how closely Americans are following stories covered by news organizations.

“Federal failures have become so common that they are less of a shock to the public than an expectation,” Light writes. At the same time, he adds, “I did not write this paper as yet another cudgel against ‘big government.’ As I have long argued, the federal government creates miracles every day, often in spite of tighter budgets, persistent criticism and complex missions.”

Light concludes in the study that government failures have been increasing over time, from an average of 1.6 per year from 1986 to 2001 to 3 per year after that.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.govexec.com/management/2014/07/governments-biggest-failures-2001-2014/88678/

For the full list of 41 failures Light assessed, click here.

Let me know if you’ve heard this one before: An agency hires “experts” to develop an application, spends tens of millions of dollars and the effort falls flat.

Let’s just state the obvious — agency contracting officers and other acquisition professionals jobs aren’t getting any easier, anytime soon.

When U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper launched a review this summer of the departmentwide offices known as the “fourth estate,” he made it clear that everything, including cuts to programs and personnel, were on the table.

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