U.S. Digital Service | The Contracting Education Academy

March 14, 2016 By AMK

White House would curb contracting waste with innovation labs

The Obama administration is rolling out a new weapon in the perennial battle against contract cost overruns and agencies taking delivery of instantly obsolete software.

Acquisition Innovation Labs, as announced last Wednesday by U.S. Chief Acquisition Officer Anne Rung, will “provide a pathway to test and implement more innovative approaches to acquisitions, with a strong emphasis on improving IT investments.”

Under the plan, each agency will appoint acquisition innovation advocates (AIAs) to promote testing of new ideas and better ways of executing existing practices in their agencies through managed risk-taking. Agencies will set up innovation labs “to promote meaningful collaboration through an integrated product team,” Rung said, and will participate in a new AIA Council to maximize collaboration across the government as well as share best practices and lessons learned.

Keep reading this article at: http://m.govexec.com/contracting/2016/03/white-house-would-curb-contracting-waste-innovation-labs/126578

February 12, 2016 By AMK

Most government employees don’t know about USDS or 18F

New digitally-focused federal agencies may need awareness campaigns, a new survey shows.

About 54 percent of federal employees don’t know about organizations such as 18F, the General Services Administration’s tech fix-it team, or the U.S. Digital Service, a White House IT consultancy now being replicated in other departments, according to a survey conducted by social network GovLoop and cloud platform vendor Acquia.

The survey, which polled about 120 civilian, defense, state and local public sector employees about digital services, found that 54 percent didn’t know what those groups were, and 18 percent felt they had little or no impact on their organizations.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2016/01/survey-most-Government-employees-dont-know-about-usds-18f/125537

November 18, 2015 By AMK

Teaching digital buyers to transform acquisition

If you teach someone traditional government procurement, you’ll get better procurement. But if you use agile learning methods and immerse the same person in real-world digital services buys, then you might help transform government acquisition.

That’s the theory behind the Office of Management and Budget’s outside-the-box approach to creating a training program for digital services contracting that’s as innovative as the methods to be bought.

OMB’s Office of Federal Procurement Policy launched a $360,000 challenge in May seeking proposals for the program. The Digital Services Contracting Professional Training and Development Program is intended to develop professionals who can embed with agency digital service teams as their business advisers, as well as acting as advocates for digital services procurement governmentwide.

Three challenge finalists — teams from GovLoop, Management Concepts Inc., ICF International, and my company, ASI Government — received $20,000 each to expand their initial responses, deliver oral presentations, and instruct a one-hour classroom session. The ICF-ASI team won the grand prize: an opportunity to test our proposal by training 30 certified contracting professionals, along with $250,000 to cover our costs. There’s another $50,000 in prize money available for developing an ongoing program.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.govexec.com/excellence/promising-practices/2015/10/teaching-digital-buyers-transform-acquisition/122948/

September 9, 2015 By AMK

Getting smarter about IT acquisition

It’s been 15 months since Joanie Newhart, an associate administrator at the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, and Tony Grayson, acquisition program executive at the Federal Acquisition Institute, announced big plans for updating the certification for federal procurement professionals.

At the 2014 FOSE conference, Newhart talked about how FAI would revamp the Federal Acquisition Certification in Contracting (FAC-C), which hadn’t been updated since 2008, to include specialized training for IT procurement, among other improvements.

The week before, Lesley Field, who was OFPP’s acting administrator at the time, had issued a memo citing the importance of better aligning FAC-C with the Defense Department’s contracting certification curriculum to strengthen the development of civilian agencies’ acquisition professionals.

The new curriculum has been in place for more than a year, and efforts to improve acquisition continue to evolve.

Keep reading this article at: http://fcw.com/articles/2015/08/27/feature-it-acquisition.aspx

August 11, 2015 By AMK

Can government be agile?

Agile is having a moment. With a promise of faster and better outcomes for everything from start-ups to the labyrinthine federal government approach to services procurement, the agile way is very much in the spotlight.

But along with this sudden fame comes the inevitable oversimplifications and forced contrasts, such as the supposed clash of the methodologies that pits agile against formal project management.

This is an artificial debate. The truth is that these two approaches can and do co-exist successfully. Project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet the project requirements; agile allows teams to deliver projects piece-by-piece and make rapid adjustments as needed. Agile is not done in place of managing a project. Instead, it is frequently introduced as a way to speed up phases of a project.

With its promise of a faster path to the right results and more satisfied customers – especially on complex projects – it’s no wonder that agile is a cornerstone of U.S. CIO Tony Scott’s mission to vastly improve customer satisfaction with federal technology services. This Agenda has already yielded such practical tools as the Digital Services Playbook—actually released and made public by Scott’s predecessor Todd Park—whose 13 plays from proven private sector best practices include Play 4, “Build the service using agile and iterative processes.” There is also the TechFAR Handbook, a helpful guide to flexibilities in the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) that can make it easier for agencies to implement plays in the Playbook through acquisition.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.federaltimes.com/story/government/management/blog/2015/08/07/can-government-agile/31293553/

The Obama administration is rolling out a new weapon in the perennial battle against contract cost overruns and agencies taking delivery of instantly obsolete software.

New digitally-focused federal agencies may need awareness campaigns, a new survey shows.

If you teach someone traditional government procurement, you’ll get better procurement. But if you use agile learning methods and immerse the same person in real-world digital services buys, then you might help transform government acquisition.

It’s been 15 months since Joanie Newhart, an associate administrator at the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, and Tony Grayson, acquisition program executive at the Federal Acquisition Institute, announced big plans for updating the certification for federal procurement professionals.

Agile is having a moment. With a promise of faster and better outcomes for everything from start-ups to the labyrinthine federal government approach to services procurement, the agile way is very much in the spotlight.

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