U.S. Digital Service | The Contracting Education Academy

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/

June 23, 2015 By AMK

White House wants to build digital-savvy contracting corps

The Obama administration is building a special squad of digital-savvy contracting officers to help agencies procure technology more effectively.

The new team will be modeled on the U.S. Digital Service, a similar effort to get more technologists into the ranks of government but will be staffed by existing agency contracting officers who undergo specialized training, Anne Rung, the administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, said at a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing this week.

Agency contracting offices often write exhaustively detailed statements of work that are often hundreds of pages long — and ask the same of companies when they submit proposals, Rung said.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2015/06/white-house-wants-build-digital-savvy-contracting-corps/115183

Learn more about the U.S. Digital Service at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/digital/united-states-digital-service

May 29, 2015 By AMK

White House contracting officer talks about flexible way for agencies to procure software

A White House contracting officer is working with the General Services Administration (GSA) to provide agencies with a “simple, quick and flexible” approach to get software applications developed faster through an iterative approach using top industry experts and with less administrative burden.

The contracting officer, Traci Walker, who is also a founding member of the U.S. Digital Service procurement team, talked about how she helped establish the method in which the White House could get a technology platform without locking itself into a service provider through a traditional contract. That success is leading to an effort to push this model out governmentwide.

She talked about her experience during a May 14 “Behind the Buy” podcast interview with Anne Rung, the administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP). The podcast series, which debuted in March and has had three episodes, features stories from federal contracting officers about using effective IT contracting strategies to help agencies get what they need.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.fiercegovernmentit.com/story/white-house-contracting-officer-talks-about-flexible-way-agencies-procure-s/2015-05-18

September 10, 2014 By AMK

White House to agencies: Embrace offbeat methods for buying tech

With no plans to return to the moon anytime soon in NASA’s future, the space agency decided to challenge private sector teams, including small startups and academia, to come up with ways to safely land commercial lunar landers on the moon’s surface and transmit data back to Earth.

None of the six teams selected by NASA to compete for the Google Lunar X PRIZE — which carries total prize winnings of $30 million and a Dec. 31, 2015, deadline — is a “traditional” government contractor.

And the method NASA used for the process — a milestone-based competition combining the best attributes of a firm, fixed-price contract with the flexibility of an indefinite-delivery deal — wasn’t exactly the typical FedBizOpps posting, either.

But the point is — it worked.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2014/08/white-house-agencies-embrace-offbeat-methods-buying-tech/92051

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.

The Obama administration is building a special squad of digital-savvy contracting officers to help agencies procure technology more effectively.

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