PBA | The Contracting Education Academy

The Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General (DoD IG) recently published a nonstatistical sample of 14 Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) IT service contracts, valued at $72 million.

The report presented the IG’s findings with respect to the question of whether DCMA properly awarded and administered the contracts. DoD IG found that for 11 of the 14 IT service contracts reviewed, valued at $61 million, DCMA contracting officials did not properly award the contracts.

The IG concluded that DoD awarded $56.4 million in IT services on contracts with poorly defined or nonexistent performance work statements, risking that the services may not meet the performance needs required to successfully execute the DCMA mission.

The problems encountered included:

Failure to properly define requirements that included measurable performance standards for 8 contracts;
Failure to develop an acquisition plan for one contract;
Failure to submit offers for two contracts awarded through the 8(a) program for Small Business Association (SBA) acceptances; and
Using flexible ordering agreements to award five of the 14 contracts, which violated Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) system requirements.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.mondaq.com/unitedstates/x/698384

**The second habit of Steven Covey’s influential and long-lived book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, is “begin with the end in mind.”**

This is the fundamental tenet of outcome-oriented acquisition and its associated methodology, “The Seven Steps to Performance-Based Acquisition.”

Performance-based acquisition is central to defense and civilian agency initiatives to improve the outcomes of the 63 percent of federal procurement spending that goes to acquire services, some $283 billion of the $447 billion in procurement in fiscal 2014.

For example, the Seven Steps are the foundation of the new Defense Department instruction for services contracting, which accounted for 53 percent of fiscal 2015 defense procurement. Similarly, the new governmentwide category management effort is building performance-based acquisition into the operating instructions for the Professional Services category.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.govexec.com/excellence/promising-practices/2016/06/outcomes-matter-more-ever-services-contracting/129012

DoD’s IG: 11 of 14 IT service contracts were not properly awarded

The Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General (DoD IG) recently published a nonstatistical sample of 14 Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA) IT service contracts, valued at $72 million.

Outcomes matter more than ever in services contracting

**The second habit of Steven Covey’s influential and long-lived book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, is “begin with the end in mind.”**

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