OMB | The Contracting Education Academy

January 29, 2021 By cs

OFPP Administrator gives ‘frictionless acquisition’ a boost on his way out the door

When it came to federal acquisition policy, the four years of the Trump administration could be considered a time of Laissez-faire.

There were only four acquisition memos signed off by the director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that didn’t deal with the COVID-19 pandemic in the past 48 months. Sure acquisition was part of many, if not all, of the technology memos and the data strategy memos, but those that addressed federal procurement and only federal procurement, were few and far between.

Along with those four OMB memos, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) issued five other memos, including three in the last month, which directed agencies to take specific steps to improve federal procurement.

In all, that’s nine memos in four years or 2.33 memos a year, which equals not a lot of oversight or changes to the federal acquisition process from a governmentwide and OMB level.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/reporters-notebook-jason-miller/2021/01/ofpp-administrator-wooten-gives-frictionless-acquisition-a-boost-on-his-way-out-the-door/

January 11, 2021 By cs

Army aims to be less dependent on contractors for software

The command of the military branch in charge of looking ahead is soliciting prototypes for a major knowledge-transfer initiative.

By March, Army Futures Command plans to award an offeror with an agreement to establish a program that would start with coding workshops and beginner training and, after five years, end with a scalable government-only software development facility.

The Army’s first soldier-led software factory “shall be staffed, built, and run from zero existing infrastructure or policy precedent, to ultimately transition to Army self-sustaining operation as a fully-uniformed agile software development unit without a heavy reliance on contracted presence,” reads a solicitation posted to beta.sam on Dec. 28th. “The future operating environment will include contested communications and the Army can no longer singularly rely on industry to provide software solutions given the infeasibility of contractors on the battlefield in a high-intensity conflict with a near-peer adversary.”

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tech/2020/12/army-aims-be-less-dependent-contractors-software/171098/

December 31, 2020 By cs

Making best-in-class contracts better for innovation

In recent years, federal acquisition policy and practice has been a competition between two different priorities: Efficiency and innovation.

Instead of balancing these priorities, innovation has taken the backseat, denying agencies access to companies that can deliver transformational solutions.

The Office of Management and Budget and the General Services Administration have an opportunity to implement several straightforward changes that can address these competing priorities.

A recent report from the Government Accountability Office provided several recommendations for OMB and GSA to improve their category management initiative, which oversees efforts such as the best-in-class contracts (BIC). While most of the GAO recommendations focused on improving guidance around category management, better defining requirements, acquisition workforce training and cost savings, what was left unaddressed was how OMB and GSA can improve the most important outcomes — delivering the best and most innovative product and service solutions to agency customers and citizens.

Category management has pushed government agencies to buy more like a single enterprise. This focus has prioritized driving savings and efficiency by eliminating redundancy by developing more useful governmentwide acquisition contracts (GWACs), such as BICs. However, having a too narrow focus on streamlining and scale sacrifices the more important priority of attracting more innovative, non-traditional companies to the federal market. That focus — long championed by organizations like the Alliance for Digital Innovation — has pushed the government to leverage inventive acquisition authorities, prioritize commercial capabilities over onerous and restrictive requirements, and encourage speed in both the pilot and production phases of IT acquisition.

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/commentary/2020/12/making-best-in-class-contracts-better-for-innovation/

December 15, 2020 By cs

OMB should lead category management efforts to improve contract data, GAO says

Efforts to improve contract data must be led by the Office of Management and Budget, if its category management initiative is to improve, according to the Government Accountability Office.

GAO found OMB‘s category management initiative focused too much on how to buy things — at the expense of helping agencies determine what goods and services they actually need — when it assessed data for 28 agencies, reviewed guidance for four and interviewed officials.

The category management initiative saved $27.3 billion in three years by having agencies use existing contracts to buy similar products and services like those in the IT Category, but billions more could be saved if OMB pursues governmentwide solutions to data challenges.

“Agency officials told GAO that data challenges — particularly challenges in collecting, analyzing, and sharing data on their spending and the prices they pay — have hindered implementation of the category management initiative,” reads GAO’s congressional report released Monday. “OMB is aware of these government-wide challenges and has directed agencies to take certain steps on their own to address them.”

Keep reading this article at: https://www.fedscoop.com/omb-category-management-data/

October 9, 2020 By cs

Why government must change its management model

Bureaucracy is getting worse, not better.

COVID-19 and the sudden shift to working remotely has accomplished something presidential initiatives, commissions and consultants failed to do — it’s forced work units and their managers to rethink working relationships. There is no time or reason to do another study; agencies have to make it work.

On the positive side, this could finally provide the impetus to shed bureaucratic practices. As John Kamensky argued in a recent column, it’s time to “strengthen unit-level health and performance.” That’s also the theme of a new book, Humanocracy, a “passionate, data-driven argument for excising bureaucracy and replacing it with something better.” The book advances the ideas in Kamensky’s column in some important ways.

The Need to ‘Excise Bureaucracy’

Government today is confronted by multiple workforce concerns: the abrupt need for highly qualified, dedicated front line workers to battle COVID; redefined manager-employee working relationships imposed by remote working; the continuing aging of the workforce; a work experience that by all reports contributes to early turnover of new hires; and a need for improved performance. Government is also affected by demographic trends, the changing career choices of the next generation of workers, and talent shortages in a number of fields. Looking ahead, in the absence of needed change, the workforce problems will deepen and performance will deteriorate.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.govexec.com/management/2020/09/why-government-must-change-its-management-model/168449/