contracting

When it comes to buying and delivering government technology projects, few approaches seem to have caught the attention of federal officials the way agile development has.

And there’s good reason, according to management specialists from the Department of Defense, the Department of Agriculture, the FBI and the General Services Administration who spoke at a Washington forum Oct. 14 about how agile development is making inroads in government. Keep reading →

As the Defense Department begins making good on plans to cut upwards of $450 billion from defense budgets over the decade ahead, one thing seems certain: A tidal wave of military personnel will soon be looking for work.

A new report, published on CNNMoney.com however, suggests that men and women in uniform will find a relatively wide assortment of high paying jobs in the market that require many of the specialized skills they learned while serving the nation. Keep reading →

American astronauts are deep in training for future missions, but with the space shuttles retired, they’re currently relying on Russia for transportation.

That’s about to change. Keep reading →

The Department of Homeland Security’s chief information officer today said DHS had made significant strides in rebalancing its over-reliance on contractors to manage DHS’s information technology projects.

When Richard Spires took the CIO helm at DHS two years ago and began a detailed review of more than 80 department IT projects, he soon realized that 110 employees was far too few in number, compared to the 1,500 outside contractors DHS was relying on, to manage DHS’s portfolio of $6.4 billion in IT projects. Keep reading →

This article was originally published by FedInsider.

The Office of Federal Procurement Policy is turning its attention to a long-neglected function, that of Contracting Officer’s Technical Representative. Starting January 1, COTRs will simply be called Contracting Officers’ Representative, or COR. Keep reading →

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. Keep reading →

Reducing costs. Reducing spending. Reducing debt. Managing through the new austerity. Doing more with less. This familiar language that the private sector uses when times get tough, is becoming increasingly familiar to governments worldwide. And the message is clear: Business as usual will no longer be tolerated.

Around the world, the massive fiscal stimulus programs that were put in place to pull economies out of the 2008 Great Recession are now being translated into fiscal consolidation strategies, and for good reason. The unprecedented fiscal expansion has led to explosive–and, in some cases, unmanageable–sovereign debt levels. The 2010 Greek debt crisis, which created financial shock waves around the globe, indicated how volatile the situation has become for a number of countries. Keep reading →

This commentary was adapted from a White House blog posted by Office of Federal Procurement Administrator Daniel Gordon.

As part of the administration’s campaign to cut waste, OMB’s Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) released guidance (Sept. 29) to reduce wasteful duplication in federal contracting.

Too often in the past, agency spending for many commonly-used items was fragmented across multiple departments, programs, and components, which means that agencies often spent time writing hundreds of separate contracts, with pricing that varies widely. The result is a waste of limited staff time and energy, and prices that are not as good as they should be.

At a cabinet meeting earlier this month, Vice President Biden pointed out that by leveraging their purchasing power agencies can save taxpayer dollars. He directed each agency leader to conduct a waste and efficiency review, targeting unnecessary or inefficient spending in areas like contracting.


OFPP’s new guidance will aid agencies in eliminating waste and carrying out the reviews ordered by the vice president by addressing concerns, raised by GAO and others, that agencies may be unnecessarily duplicating each other’s contracting efforts. This guidance requires agencies to prepare “business cases” – analyses to ensure they aren’t duplicating an existing contract and that they are getting the best value for taxpayers- before they establish or renew certain interagency and agency-specific contracts for commonly-used goods and services, such as office supplies and wireless services.

Doing this kind of due diligence and comparison-shopping is something that many families across the country do, and it is especially important that the Federal government weigh all the options before entering into large contracts and agreements whose scope would overlap contracts that already exist. In the business case, agencies are required to balance the value of creating a new contract against the benefit of using an existing one, and whether the expected return from investment in the proposed contract is worth the taxpayer resources. Insisting on that cost/benefit analysis in the business cases should go a long way to avoiding duplicative contracts.

The progress we’ve made in this area is a key reason why we think GAO should take interagency contracting off its ‘high risk’ list.” Keep reading →

The White House has informed government procurement executives they must take new steps to avoid establishing or renewing certain types of procurement contracts that potentially duplicate existing contracts for goods and services agencies commonly buy.

The memo, issued by Office of Federal Procurement Policy Administrator Dan Gordon Sept. 29, takes aim at missed opportunities by agencies to leverage the government’s buying power.

It also is intended to curtail what many regard as the wasteful practice of establishing new contracts that overlap or duplicate existing contracts for billions of dollars of supplies and services.

“For too long, each agency was on its own in contracting,” said Gordon, in a White House blog post also released Sept. 29.

The action by OFPP was generally welcomed by the contracting community.

“The number of GWACs has declined in the past few years while agency-specific contract vehicles are increasing; it seems that everyone likes to have their own contracts,” said Steve Charles, co-founder and executive vice president, immixGroup (and a contributor to Breaking Gov.)

“So with no intervention like this from OFPP, interagency contracting would eventually wither along with all the benefits. It was high time for OFPP to act,” he said, “but look for a short-term surge of agency-specific vehicles between now and 2014. Then the pendulum will swing and I predict interagency contracting will surge again around 2017,” he said.

Under the new guidance, agencies planning solicitations for new acquisitions will be responsible for developing a business case to support the establishment or renewal of three types of acquisition contracts:

Governmentwide acquistion contracts, which are multiple award, indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contracts often used for buying technology systems and services. Starting after Dec. 31, 2011, business cases are required for all GWACs regardless of estimated value.

Multi-agency contracts, which provide a wide variety of supplies and services to agencies, managed by the General Services Administration. In cases where interagency use is expected to be significant (exceeding 25% or more of total obligations over the life of the contract), agencies will also have to make a business case beginning in 2012.

Agency-specific contracts or blanket purchase agreements. In cases where a contract or BPA would create a significant overlap (where more than 25% of the total obligations over the life of the contract would include supplies or services covered by the government’s SmartBUY program and Federal Strategic Sourcing Initiatve), agencies would again have to make a business case beginning in2012.

“Business cases shall be approved by an authority no lower than the agency’s senior procurement executive (SPE) or equivalent official,” the memo said.

“In the business case, agencies are required to balance the value of creating a new contract against the benefit of using an existing one, and whether the expected return from investment in the proposed contract is worth the taxpayer resources,” Gordon said in his blog.

“Insisting on that cost/benefit analysis in the business cases should go a long way to avoiding duplicative contracts,” he said.

Gordon also said the new guidance should increase information-sharing among agencies.

“There have been some who have said that interagency contracts are a problem. We disagree. We have seen firsthand that interagency contracting – done intelligently, and in a way that reduces duplication – can help us leverage the federal government’s buying power to get better prices,” he said.

“The progress we’ve made in this area is a key reason why we think GAO should take interagency contracting off its ‘high risk’ list,” he added.

Keep reading →

If you could improve your agency’s bottom line and reduce your IT infrastructure costs, all without sacrificing mission-critical capabilities, where would you start?

Ideally, you’d like to know where you’re getting the best performance from your IT investment, along with knowledge about over-use and under-use so you’d know where to make cuts, and whether you might be able to consolidate some operations to save money. Keep reading →

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