The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has found an innovative way to address a shortage of trained acquisition professionals, growing contracting complexities and a need to curb waste, fraud and abuse for itself and other federal agencies.
Since September 2008, the VA has operated its own Acquisition Academy – a school built from the ground up to train a new generation of procurement officers to handle the agency’s $16 billion annual procurement budget.
“We wanted to create learning that improved performance,” Lisa Doyle (pictured above), the academy’s chancellor, told Breaking Gov.
Praised by those inside the government and the contracting world as a cutting edge facility, the academy is doing something that government is often criticized for lacking: Stepping up to the plate and fixing a problem.
“They very much encourage the students to really aim high. The philosophy teaches how to be a business advisor and help your agency get a good deal.” – Steve Kelman
It has 16 classrooms in Frederick, Md., and a professional staff providing students with core acquisition competencies, and skills in business, management, communication and customer service.
The academy is not only meeting the needs of the VA, it has attracted students from eight other federal agencies –General Services Administration, the Departments of Transportation, Health and Human Services, Agriculture, Homeland Security, Commerce, Defense and Justice.
All these agencies have been reeling from the loss of experienced senior procurement officials and don’t have the resources to develop the proper procurement staff.
Doyle is not stopping at the VA. She chairs the curriculum committee of the Vets to Feds (V2F) Career Development Program for Student Trainee (Contracting), sponsored by the Interagency Council on Veterans Employment.
And she has plenty to show them. So far, some 8,000 individuals have participated in academy courses, planting the seeds for a new age of government procurement performance. Students completing the program requirements either achieve or maintain their Federal Acquisition Certification in Contracting (FAC-C).
“They very much encourage the students to really aim high,” said government management expert Steve Kelman of Harvard University. “The philosophy teaches how to be a business adviser and help your agency get a good deal.”
Kelman envisions the academy growing in many different ways, including developing subsections for other agencies to focus on their specific needs.
And the academy is delivering the goods. Doyle said the academy offers a learning environment that blends several approaches including some distance learning and is aimed at motivating acquisition professionals to apply sound business judgment to their work and enhance mission support.
It houses the Acquisition Internship School, Contracting Professional School, and Program Management School. It plans to open the Facilities Management School and the Supply Chain Management School later this year. The courses last up to two weeks.
Participants in the Acquisition Internship School – a two-year program in which interns are paid – get formal training and can select job rotations at 47 different locations to give them a wide range of experiences. In 2010, interns on job rotations supported over 1,000 contracts with a $5.4 billion total value, Doyle said.
Doyle said she sought to create a different kind of learning environment. She worked with a furniture designer to make the classrooms full of color textures, funky fabrics, different glass, wood and metals, nothing like the drab gray or green that usually washes over a government setting.
In an age of belt-tightening and the demands to do something new, different and better, the VA’s academy is a model for what government must do to succeed in the world of procurement.
“We’re having people who have better training, and that’s the goal of the academy,” said Gary Krump, the former VA deputy assistant secretary for Acquisition and Material Management. “The academy is not just training procurement officers, it is training business managers.”
It is filling a major hole in the government’s drive for excellence and efficiency, added Al Burman, former administrator for Federal Procurement Policy at the Office of Management and Budget.
“If there’s any challenge agencies have today it is to get people with the knowledge and expertise to handing the sophisticated contracting function,” he said.