OFPP | The Contracting Education Academy

April 26, 2018 By AMK

Recognizing the need for innovation in acquisition

The President’s Management Agenda lays out ambitious plans for the federal government to modernize information technology, prepare its future workforce and improve the way it manages major acquisitions.

These are among 14 cross-agency priority goals on which the administration is focused as it seeks to jettison outdated legacy systems and embrace less cumbersome ways of doing business.

Increasingly, federal IT managers are recognizing the need for innovation in acquisition, not just technology modernization. What exactly will it take to modernize an acquisition system bound by the 1,917-page Federal Acquisition Regulation? Federal acquisition experts say the challenges have less to do with changing those rules than with human behavior – the incentives, motivations and fears of people who touch federal acquisition – from the acquisition professionals themselves to mission owners and government executives and overseers.

“If you want a world-class acquisition system that is responsive to customer needs, you have to be able to use the right tool at the right time,” says Mathew Blum, associate administrator in the Office of Federal Procurement Policy at the Office of Management and Budget. The trouble isn’t a lack of options, he said at the American Council for Technology’s ACT/IAC Acquisition Excellence conference March 27. Rather he said, it is lack of bandwidth and fear of failure that conspire to keep acquisition pros from trying different acquisition strategies.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.govtechworks.com/risk2innovate/#gs.Xjt4eHI

March 26, 2018 By AMK

Riding the acquisition innovation avalanche

You know a transformation is afoot when the Navy chooses as its acquisition chief a man known as “Hondo,” who is famous for an Iron Man exoskeleton project and a “Thunderdrone” UAV tournament.

Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition James “Hondo” Geurts is the father of SOFWERX, the U.S. Special Forces Command’s technology incubator, where the super suit and the drone coliseum are housed. SOFWERX is dedicated to fomenting creative collisions among divergent thinkers, and Geurts is the personification of the most expansive explosion of innovative in federal acquisition in a quarter century.

As Geurts often says, we are in the Age of Surprise. Timelines are shorter. The technology gap between the United States and its adversaries is disappearing.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.govexec.com/excellence/promising-practices/2018/03/riding-acquisition-innovation-avalanche/146745/

December 21, 2017 By AMK

‘Reinventing government,’ 25 years later

We are coming up next year on the 25th anniversary of the country’s first and perhaps only governmentwide management reform program organized around a coherent theme: the Clinton administration’s “reinventing government” effort.

In 1993, the first year of the Clinton administration, I went on leave from my job at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, where I was a professor of public management, to take a Senate-confirmed position in the Office of Management and Budget as administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy. That office of 30-odd civil servants did not buy anything itself but had the lead role in formulating governmentwide procurement policy.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the thinking about how to manage well in government began to turn toward performance. As political scientists William Gormley and Steven Balla have written, “The concept of performance came to rival accountability as a standard for evaluating executive branch agencies.”

Keep reading this article at: https://fcw.com/articles/2017/12/06/kelman-25-years-of-acquisition-reform.aspx

November 20, 2017 By AMK

The quest to strengthen the acquisition workforce

Fewer taxpayer dollars are wasted when federal acquisition professionals are well trained to manage government contracts.

Every day, federal government employees work diligently to help government agencies serve the public. One specialized group has dedicated their careers to helping build and manage the contracts with suppliers that sell goods and services to the government. They must navigate through a maze of regulations, field endless customer requirements, and conquer a constant stream of contracts that help the U.S. government do its work. These are the workers in the federal government acquisition ecosystem. With their help, the U.S. government buys and manages technology projects smarter, more efficiently, and with greater returns on investment.

To keep pace with fast-changing technology, the government must enable its acquisition workforce to quickly adapt and pivot for project success.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.td.org/Publications/Magazines/TD/TD-Archive/2017/11/The-Quest-to-Strengthen-the-Acquisition-Workforce

November 17, 2017 By AMK

Experts: government should buy like the behemoth it is

Government is the biggest purchaser in the world and need to start acting like it, according to federal experts who spoke at the ACT-IAC Executive Leadership Conference on Oct. 31.

“We are the largest buyer in the entire world. We don’t always act that way so we are trying to get agencies to move in that direction,” said Beth Angerman, executive director of the Unified Shared Service Management Office in the General Services Administration.

Angerman explained that much of her job is convincing agencies to share basic services that can be bought in bulk from the private sector, likening the process to convincing her two young children to share at home. She said that while most agencies like the idea of sharing, few want to sit down and actually map out what that sharing will look like.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.federaltimes.com/acquisition/2017/11/01/experts-government-should-buy-like-the-behemoth-it-is/

The President’s Management Agenda lays out ambitious plans for the federal government to modernize information technology, prepare its future workforce and improve the way it manages major acquisitions.

You know a transformation is afoot when the Navy chooses as its acquisition chief a man known as “Hondo,” who is famous for an Iron Man exoskeleton project and a “Thunderdrone” UAV tournament.

We are coming up next year on the 25th anniversary of the country’s first and perhaps only governmentwide management reform program organized around a coherent theme: the Clinton administration’s “reinventing government” effort.

Fewer taxpayer dollars are wasted when federal acquisition professionals are well trained to manage government contracts.

Government is the biggest purchaser in the world and need to start acting like it, according to federal experts who spoke at the ACT-IAC Executive Leadership Conference on Oct. 31.

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