OFPP | The Contracting Education Academy

December 31, 2019 By cs

Acquisition leans into automation

Automation is gaining traction in federal acquisition.

“When we met with senior leaders a few weeks ago, they had a list of processes they wanted automated by that week,” Lesley Field, deputy administrator for federal procurement policy at the Office of Management and Budget, said at a panel discussion at the 2019 Presidential Rank Awards Leadership Summit on Dec. 17. She said the acquisition workforce is enthusiastic about developing robotics process automation tools within the government.

Soraya Correa, chief acquisition officer at the Department of Homeland Security, noted that automation technologies offer a number of advantages, including limiting problems that can stem from data bias.

“With automation, we can get to a fairer process,” he said. “Right now, we engage more data bias because we’re limited by what we can do as long as we’re telling industry what we’re willing to do and where we’re going to go look for this information.”

Keep reading this article at: https://gcn.com/articles/2019/12/24/acquisition-automation.aspx

December 26, 2019 By cs

Experts praise new acquisition workforce training requirements

Experts welcomed provisions in a defense policy bill that will reform the training requirements for federal procurement officials to better align with those in the private sector.

At the time of this posting, the House passed the $738 billion fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Act and the Senate is expected to vote on it.

“Most of these changes do not dramatically impact the acquisition system. A lot of them are just amendments to pre-existing acquisition reform legislation,” said Robert Burton, partner with Crowell & Moring LLP and former deputy administrator and acting administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy. However, he noted that “one of the most significant provisions” directs the Defense Department to redesign the workforce training process to align with that of the private sector for the first time.

The bill gives the Defense secretary the authority to create certification requirements using either internationally or nationally recognized standards.

“The two workforces will be more aligned in their training and career paths and will be able to communicate more efficiently and also it will provide opportunities for … movement between the federal government and private sectors as far as acquisition personnel being able to rotate more easily between the two sectors,” Burton said. In the past, “it’s been a problem” that the government and private sectors are “not aligned in their thinking and training.”

Keep reading this article at: https://www.govexec.com/management/2019/12/experts-praise-new-acquisition-workforce-training-requirements/161894/

December 23, 2019 By cs

SBA ‘beats the odds’ by finalizing several major contracting regulations

In November 2018, Federal News Network and procurement expert Larry Allen set some odds about whether certain acquisition regulations would be completed sometime in 2019.

For the most part, the odds makers were not optimistic, given the fact that during 2017 and 2018, the number of FAR rules that were either proposed or finalized were scarce.

So here we are a year later, and it’s nice to be able to report that the Small Business Administration, at least, may just have beaten the odds on several important procurement provisions.

Over the last few weeks, SBA finalized rules to improve the HUBZone program, to change the way the government calculates small business sizes based on earnings and a half dozen other rules that have been in the works since the 2015.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/reporters-notebook-jason-miller/2019/12/sba-beats-the-odds-by-finalizing-several-major-contracting-regulations/

November 19, 2019 By cs

Frictionless federal acquisition? — It’s possible and a new online tool can help

One of the best questions that came up at the recent 2019 Imagine Nation ELC conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was during a panel on acquisition. It went something like this: If the Federal Acquisition Regulations are a Frankenstein monster of cobbled together rules and requirements, why not just start over?

A question many federal acquisition and program managers probably have asked themselves at least a dozen times a year.

While the 2,000 page FAR probably has some body parts that agencies could do without, there is no reason to kill the monster.

Meagan Metzger, founder and CEO of Dcode, which promotes the use of commercial technology in the public sector, said there are important concepts that the FAR promotes that every contracting officer or program manager needs to know.

Chris Hamm, the director of FEDSIM at the General Services Administration, offered a common refrain—the FAR lets you do almost anything, especially under Parts 8.4 and 12.

Then why are agencies and vendors alike so excited about Other Transaction Authorities (OTAs) or Commercial Solution Openings (CSOs) as a way to avoid—get around—using the FAR?

New data from the Professional Services Council’s 2019 Vision Forecast found the Defense Department’s use of OTA’s mushroomed by 40% in 2018 over 2017 and some estimates say the Pentagon could spend as much as $7 billion through this approach in 2019.

GSA and the Department of Homeland Security also have begun using similar authorities.

GSA, for instance, has done eight awards under its CSO authority. Tom Howder, the acting deputy commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service, said at the PSC event that 75% of the awards went to companies without a GSA schedule, meaning non-traditional contractors.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/reporters-notebook-jason-miller/2019/11/frictionless-federal-acquisition-its-possible-and-a-new-online-tool-can-help/

October 7, 2019 By cs

New OFPP administrator seeks to reduce risks of federal contracting through AI, robotics

Michael Wooten became the 15^th administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy about six weeks ago. More importantly, he became the first permanent head of federal procurement during the Trump administration.

In his first two public speeches last week, Wooten hit all the expected notes that an OFPP administrator is supposed to reach — building on existing efforts like category management, upskilling the workforce, unlocking technology to create innovation and harnessing acquisition data to turn it into business intelligence.

“There is a considerable alignment that supports what we are doing. This is a good time to be the administrator. There are a lot of people who are cheerleading, saying ‘go, go go and do things for us.’ It’s a good time to cut regulations that get in our way and I’m happy about that,” Wooten said at the Tech Trends conference sponsored by the Professional Services Council in Washington, D.C. “This is a good time to skill up the workforce. I have a mindset that we need to help the workforce shift to the right or use those human judgement skills as opposed to the rote stuff that software can do.”

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/reporters-notebook-jason-miller/2019/09/new-ofpp-administrator-seeks-to-reduce-risks-of-federal-contracting-through-ai-robotics/

Automation is gaining traction in federal acquisition.

Experts welcomed provisions in a defense policy bill that will reform the training requirements for federal procurement officials to better align with those in the private sector.

In November 2018, Federal News Network and procurement expert Larry Allen set some odds about whether certain acquisition regulations would be completed sometime in 2019.

Michael Wooten became the 15th administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy about six weeks ago. More importantly, he became the first permanent head of federal procurement during the Trump administration.

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Michael Wooten became the 15^th administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy about six weeks ago. More importantly, he became the first permanent head of federal procurement during the Trump administration.