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December 10, 2020 By cs

Creating an infrastructure for procurement innovation at DHS

Setting up the Department of Homeland Security’s Procurement Innovation Lab (PIL) was one of the first things Soraya Correa did after becoming DHS chief procurement officer in 2015.

It originally had one half of one full-time employee, and the lab reported to her.  Polly Hall, the PIL’s current director, came to the lab in 2017 from having worked as a contracting officer on a Transportation Security Administration procurement where she had been trying to think about new techniques for doing advisory downselects.  Since then the PIL has grown to a full-time staff of six, and most DHS components also have an acquisition innovation advisor (not a full-time position) who acts as a sort of local representative for what the PIL and Correa were trying to do.

With the PIL’s own staff and the acquisition innovation advisors in the components, DHS arguably has established more of an ongoing innovation capacity than any other federal agency.  Correa and her colleagues are institutionalizing innovation, something we rarely see in the government.

The PIL’s operating principle is not to force itself on DHS contracting people. It is not a tiger team that swoops in and takes over a procurement.  PIL staffers come in only when asked by the people doing the procurement – both program and contracting people. They provide advice to the frontline folks, and those employees then do the work.  For projects being supported, staff from the PIL meet with their contracting customers every other week for 15 minutes until the contract or task order is awarded.

Keep reading this article at: https://fcw.com/blogs/lectern/2020/11/kelman-dis-pil-innovations.aspx

Filed Under: Government Contracting News Tagged With: acquisition reform, DHS, Procurement Innovation Lab, procurement reform

September 3, 2020 By cs

Agencies achieving frictionless acquisition in variety of ways

Years of criticism directed at federal agencies has created a culture of risk aversion. That’s something which Soraya Correa, Department of Homeland Security chief procurement officer, said needs to change.

“We’ve got to allow people to do things differently, to try new [things], and so take those chances,” she said Tuesday. “And we the leadership in this profession and across all the professions need to support our people a little bit better to make them feel that confidence that they can take some calculated risks and move the ball forward.”

Correa was part of the Accelerating Acquisition in the Dynamic Workplace webinar, sponsored by FedInsider, which gathered agency acquisition leaders to talk about inefficiencies in federal procurement and what they would like to be done differently.

One of Correa’s initiatives, DHS’ Procurement Innovation Lab, has set an example of creating “safe spaces” for innovation. Its PIL boot camp has proved popular with other agencies and DHS  and its components have awarded a cumulative 52 PIL procurement projects from fiscal 2015, when the lab started, to 2019, according to the agency.

Several speakers referenced the Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting Systems (CPARS), an electronic workflow that reports and rates contractor performance, at the General Services Administration. Correa said DHS is championing artificial intelligence to track past performance with CPARS data, but the system is “daunting.”

Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/acquisition/2020/08/agencies-achieving-frictionless-acquisition-in-variety-of-ways/

Filed Under: Government Contracting News Tagged With: CPARS, DHS, EPA, frictionless acquisition, GSA, Procurement Innovation Lab, risk, risk averse

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