This is the final installment in a series of columns by Recovery Board Chairman Earl Devaney on the lessons he has learned from his work on the Recovery Board, which oversees the $787 billion Recovery program. The column originally appeared at Recovery.gov.
Having spent nearly four decades in the federal government before taking this job in February 2009, I thought I knew pretty much everything about how the government works. Keep reading →
The Naval Special Warfare Group 4 (NSWG4) is responsible for development and testing of combatant craft and associated ordinance and equipment. The command is also responsible for the development and evaluation of operational doctrine, tactics and procedures. NSWG4 monitors and certifies the Combat Readiness of assigned craft and SWCC (Special Warfare Combatant Craft Crewman).
In the past, NSWG4 has had more than adequate numbers of craft, engines and spare parts. However, with today’s current demand for combat operations, security force assistance (SFA) and fiscal downsizing, NSWG4 had to develop a different business sustainment model to meet missions with fewer assets. This new model includes speeding up the procurement process for craft repairs and spare parts. By decreasing the ordering cycle time for repairs and parts, less craft and assets are required to meet continued customer requirements. Keep reading →
Disgover.com, a relatively new social networking and collaboration tool, is throwing out that boring and time-consuming 20th century office meeting.
Gone is the urgency for face-to-face meetings, long distance conference calls, high-priority e-mail messages or communal gatherings at a high-end hotel in a posh locale, travel costs that are a drain on government budgets in these austere times. Keep reading →
This is the second of a three-part series examining government services addressing key challenges among military veterans amid high unemployment, a woeful economic outlook and an anticipated influx of veterans returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan in the next few years.
When Nick Colgin came back from treating gunshot wounded soldiers and civilians in Afghanistan, he set out to find a job doing what he had done well enough to save lives in the war-torn country. Keep reading →
President Obama signed an executive order today directing federal agencies to limit the number of electronic devices issued to federal employees, expand their use of teleconferencing in lieu of travel and reduce the volume of documents the government prints each year.
Agencies have within 45 days to develop plans to reduce by 20 percent the combined federal spending associated with these and other expenses, including what agencies spend on vehicle fleets and the production of “non-essential items” for promotional purposes. Keep reading →
Government contractors need to prepare not only for a more austere future for government spending, but also adapt to a shifting landscape that is favoring task orders over traditional acquisition contracts, a leading government forecasting group said today.
Among the forces reshaping that landscape are agency efforts to accelerate the delivery of technology and other projects. One way they’re doing that is by breaking projects into smaller, more modular chunks. That has resulted in a growing use of task orders, said Kevin Plexico, senior vice president for research and analysis services at Deltek, speaking at Deltek’s FedFocus 2012 forum today. Keep reading →
Casey Kelley has one main thing to worry about. But it’s a doozy. As director of the Enterprise Acquisition Division at GSA, he’s responsible for the Alliant governmentwide acquisition contract.
Just one contract, but it encompasses 58 suppliers. Many of them are the top tier IT contractors and consultants such as CSC, Deloitte, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and Verizon. And it’s done $8 billion in business in its 29 months since opening for business. Task orders total 180, with the largest – $2.5 billion over 10 years – placed by the State Department. (The companion Alliant Small Business GWAC operates out of a different division in GSA, in Kansas City.)
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This article was originally published by FedInsider.
____________________________________________________Casey Kelley has one main thing to worry about. But it’s a doozy. As director of the Enterprise Acquisition Division at GSA, he’s responsible for the Alliant governmentwide acquisition contract. Just one contract, but it encompasses 58 suppliers. Many of them are the top tier IT contractors and consultants such as CSC, Deloitte, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and Verizon. And it’s done $8 billion in business in its 29 months since opening for business. Task orders total 180, with the largest – $2.5 billion over 10 years – placed by the State Department. (The companion Alliant Small Business GWAC operates out of a different division in GSA, in Kansas City.)
Unlike managers of other GWACs selling commodity products, Kelley and his crew were planning to go home at the usual quitting time of 5 p.m. – that’s Pacific Time since they’re in Los Angeles – on Friday evening, Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal 2011. Enterprise Acquisition is part of the Integrated Technology Services piece of GSA, itself part of the Federal Acquisition Service.
“Oh, we’re doing great,” Kelley said of the Alliant team. “The three predecessor contracts in 29 months? Alliant is exceeding all three combined,” he said, referring to the expired Answer, Millennia and Millennia Light GWACs.
Kelley attributes the early success of Alliant to the team’s pushy approach and to the value added service it gives federal customers.
“It’s not as if, if you build it they will come,” Kelley said. Agency outreach and an annual Alliant Guide published in Federal Computer Week help, he said. Plus, the Alliant team will review statements of work before they are awarded as task orders, to make sure they are totally within the scope of the Alliant contracts.
Alliant offers IT services in the context of Federal Enterprise Architecture and the Department of Defense Enterprise Architecture. That, Kelley said, enables a kind of auto-refresh of products delivered as part of the services the vendors are selling. Put another way, if the services ordered are within scope, and the products are integral and necessary to the execution of the task order, than whatever products are necessary are by definition within scope.
“Because we’re aligned with the FEA, the technology is always up to date,” Kelley said. Alliant avoids the tedious tech refresh, product modification process that characterizes product GWACs.
Federal agencies increasingly seek cloud computing and so-called smart building services when they come to Alliant, Kelley said. Data center consolidation and virtualization have also driven agencies to Alliant, he said.
Kelley has been a federal manager for 13 years. Before joining, he was a business developer in the telecom industry. His first federal stint was as telecommunications director for a federal courthouse in Los Angeles (where his wife was a probation officer). “I bought my services via GSA, and that’s how I got to know them,” he said.
Kelley has also had an impact on the federal scene itself in Los Angeles. He spent a year as chairman of the Federal Executive Board, which is actually housed in Long Beach. In a given city, the FEB members meet quarterly to discuss topics such as crisis management, local interagency coordination and other management topics. Each FEB has a full-time executive director, who is also a federal employee. FEBs were established during the Kennedy administration.
Asked if FEB members talk about Washington when they get together, Kelley replied, “All the time.” But, he said, it tends to be less grousing about headquarters than looking for ways to improve communications. Sometimes, he said, a national initiative can originate in a regional office. Kelley cited the Los Angeles office of Housing and Urban Development. It developed a model for delivering information about services available to people in danger of losing their homes through foreclosure.
Much FEB effort concerns continuity of operations and crisis coordination locally, such as during Southern California wild fires, Kelley said. Sometimes representatives from federal agencies get together for table-top planning exercises.
During his term, Kelley said, he worked to establish a separate Federal Executive Board for San Diego. Although it was included in the Los Angeles FEB, in reality San Diego is a two hour drive away on a good day. The difficulty was convincing Navy officials, he said.
“It was no easy feat, but we convinced them.” Now San Diego federal managers have a Federal Executive Association, a precursor to having their own FEB.
Social media is approaching main stream adoption in the federal government, with 41% of federal workforce respondents polled in a new survey having begun using social media in the past year. That’s in addition to 51% who had begun using social media more than a year ago, leaving only 8% of federal employees who say they do not use social media.
Perhaps more significantly, the distinction of where federal employees use social media–once clearly confined to home or controlled office use–has begun to dissolve. While 92% of federal respondents said they use social media at home, 74% use it at work, and 70% use it via mobile devices, the study suggested federal agencies are demonstrating a new level of comfort in using social media. Keep reading →
When is a small business not a small business? When it’s a large business. Confused? So is Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.).
McCaskill thinks the classification standard used by the government to categorize businesses for statistical purposes “simply doesn’t make sense” when applied to the federal small-business contract-award process and wants to do something about it. Keep reading →
At the height of our nation’s economic crisis, 34-year-old Interior Department employee Mary Pletcher became the lead career executive for awarding and tracking $2.9 billion in economic stimulus funds used to preserve and restore iconic national treasures, provide vital infrastructure in impoverished Indian communities and create jobs.
Leading the largest single investment in public lands since the Civilian Conservation Corps of the New Deal, Pletcher managed funds for some 4,000 projects ranging from major improvements to Ellis Island to the nation’s largest dam removal and natural habitat restoration project on the Elwha River in Washington State. Under her leadership, Interior met all of the requirements under the stimulus law on time, and with no significant instances of waste or fraud. Keep reading →