Vern Edwards

Not that I know of. I developed that exercise this morning.

Their name and signature goes on the document, so...

Invest the time saved by delegating to providing more training.

Here is a training exercise for brand-new newbies. The objective is to make them learn through their own research and thinking and by writing a set of five 500-word explanatory essays. Give them five working-days to complete the entire exercise. Do not give them any other work during that period. After they turn them in their work, grade the essays and then discuss their research and essays in a group session. Before giving them the exercise, provide a brief introduction to the Federal Acquisition Regulation to show its organization and content, and show them Acquision.gov. You can show them the following videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tofK_W0QxPg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX_6ym6mP5Q Make sure they have access to the reference materials listed below. Give them five working days to complete the exercise and turn in their essays. At the end of the exercise you will know a lot about each of the newbies and their personal needs. ============================================================ EXERCISE Based on your own research of the reference materials listed below, any other such references that you can find, and reliable information obtained by searching the Internet, write one 500-word, typed (one side of one sheet of paper, one-inch margins, single-spaced, Times New Roman 11-point font), explanatory essay about of each of the following five concepts: Contract Contract line item Contract formation Contract modification Contract quality assurance Your work must be your own. Write your essays in your own words. Write them for someone who knows nothing about the topics. Do not cite your sources. Do not quote from sources. (Your essays will be scanned for quotes.) Each essay must be exactly 500 words in length, no more, no less. (Word counts will be checked.) You must complete this exercise by close of business on __________________. Reference materials Federal Acquisition Regulation Formation of Government Contracts, 4th ed. Administration of Government Contracts, 5th ed. Any other reliable sources of information that you find. ==============================================================

Formal (classroom) training in government contracting has never been very good. But I received excellent OJT from a cadre of very experienced DOD 1102s, from GS-12 through GS-16 (now SES). They had worked in the business for years and gladly taught us from the ground up. And the training program in which I was enrolled, the old Air Force "Copper Cap" program, ran for five years, from GS-05 through GS-12. You could not become a CO until you were a GS-13. And that was when contracting was much simpler than is today. I never had a proper mentor. Everyone in the office was willing to answer a question or two face-to-face. But being told something is not good enough. And there is nothing more pathetic than the person who is in the boss's (or mentor's) office every 15 minutes with yet another question. You must learn what, how, and why, and in order to learn you have to read and think. Absolutely right! Read, read, read! Study, study, study! It pays off in work and life! Never, ever, let anybody know more about your job than you! (It's a never-ending road, because there's always somebody who knows more than you about something.) And don't just read regulations and contracting stuff. Read about thinking and writing and questioning and explaining. Read Plato, Aristotle, and Euclid. Train your brain to read hard stuff. Trust me, if you can get through even part of Aristotle's Organon you'll never be daunted by the FAR or any other government regulation. Even a paragraph or two will make you smarter than you were, and dumber at the same time, if that makes sense, because then you'll want to know more. Unless you're one of those sad incurious people. You cannot know it all, and you'll never know enough, but keep at it. It will be like the fighting retreat from Tu Lē, you'll lose in the end because you can't know everything, but people who matter will remember your fight. If you think you got a good education at the university while studying for a bachelor's or master's degree, then you weren't paying attention.

I witnessed the effect of inexperience and inadequate training at the Dublin, Ireland, airport yesterday. I was lined up to check in and check bags for my flight to Reykjavik, Iceland. There were about 200 people in the line for my flight, and thousands in line for other flights. I was near the head of my line. We had waited over an hour for an agent to show up. Finally, one did. Many prospective flyers were tired and annoyed by then, but calm. (Again, this was Ireland, not the U.S.) We had two hours before the flight was scheduled to take off. The agent quickly turned on the computer, got set up, and started processing passengers. (Check passport; check Covid antigen test result; check reservation; print boarding pass; weigh bags; attach bag tag.) Of course, some people showed up with issues and problems that took longer. I used a stopwatch to calculate an average time for each boarding process before mine and calculated that the agent was taking an average of 2.5 minutes per process. (Most boarding involved two persons at time, so my average was based on 100 processes.) At the average rate, the agent was going to need four hours to process everyone. Take-off was two hours away. People began wondering if the agent would get some backup. Forty-five minutes later a younger agent arrived. But the second agent immediately ran into process issues that they could not solve. Thus, the experienced agent had to stop what they were doing to go help the inexperienced agent. There were two agents, but one of them was doing about 60-75 percent of the work. Fortunately, I was near the front of the line. The situation was similar at security. Huge line. Based on my observations, the agents scanning bags were diverting about 30 percent of them for more detailed inspections, including mine. There were hundreds of people lined up to pass through security, and the agents doing the detailed inspections were backed up, being overwhelmed. It took about 20 minutes for an inspecting agent to get to my bag. The agent opened the bag and rolled their eyes. The bag need not have been diverted. The scanning agents, inexperienced and doubtful about what they were seeing on their screens, resolved their doubts by diverting bags for detailed inspection, as they should have. Procedure required the inspecting agent to take everything out and then do an explosive residues test on diverted bags. The agent inspecting my bag kept apologizing for the delay (again, I was in Ireland), but I was okay with it. We ended up laughing about it. The scene was chaotic. One agent wasted at least 15 minutes trying to find the person who had placed a small bottle of Pepto Bismol in the scanning tray. Not in a bag, in a tray. The agent wanted to give it back, shouting over the din, "Whose is this? Whose is this?" I wondered why the agent didn't just toss it or set it aside. The weekend before in Dublin, about 1,400 persons missed their flights because of check-in and security delays. It was a national scandal, and made headlines in all the Irish newspapers. Thus, the wages of inexperience and inadequate training. I found the whole thing fascinating, especially after reading Don's post.

The ceiling price should reflect the contracting parties' agreement on a reasonable estimate of what it will cost the contractor to complete the job, plus a fair profit. See the first sentence of FAR 52.232-7, paragraph (d), Total cost.

@ContractJockeyAs far as I have been able to determine, the SOO-instead-of-SOW technique was developed by the Air Force in the mid-1990s for use in the Joint Defense Attack Munition (JDAM) program. See Tactical aircraft programs : hearing before the Military Research and Development Subcommittee, joint with Military Procurement Subcommittee, of the Committee on National Security, House of Representatives, One Hundred Fourth Congress, second session, hearing held June 27, 1996, Statement of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology, p. 136: DOD proclaimed use of the SOO technique to be a success, and formally adopted it by inclusion in Military Handbook (MIL-HDBK) 245, Preparation of Statement of Work, Revision D, dated 3 April 1996, Section 1.3: https://quicksearch.dla.mil/Transient/8FA55F5E6AEF43D6A50955BA228ECA46.pdf Section 5 is slightly longer than 3 pages in length. An excerpt: More guidance was published in the following months. The basic idea is that you write a SOO describing the kind of service you want to buy and your acquisition objectives, and you then instruct the prospective offeror(s) to write a contract SOW in which they state the tasks they will perform to achieve your objectives. You then negotiate the final text of the SOW as necessary and appropriate for contracting. OFPP, which in the mid-1990s was campaigning for the use of "performance-based service contracting," picked up on the idea and promoted it, even to the point of adding brief coverage to FAR. They resorted to the SOO idea when they realized that the average agency acquisition team could not figure out how to write a performance work statement. It seemed easier to assign that task to competing offerors as part of the typical source selection "essay-writing contest." As is often the case, PWACs in contracting screwed it up. I have seen 100+ page SOOs in RFPs. The SOO technique reflects a commercial practice in contract formation, one in which buyers select sellers and then negotiate detailed contract terms instead of writing detailed in-house SOWs and then asking competing offerors to describe their "technical" approaches to doing what the SOW says they must do. Successful use of the SOO technique requires knowledge, experience, skill, and sophistication in both sole source negotiations and source selection "discussions." The CO and contract specialist must: understand that SOWs are not strictly technical documents, but legal documents with technical content, have at least an educated layperson's understanding of the technical requirements, be supported by a knowledgable technical team; know something about legal writing and possess good legal-writing reference materials, and have counsel and assistance from a competent government contracts attorney. Any idiot can use the SOO technique, but successful use demands knowledge, experience, and sophistication. It should not be used by the average GS-12 or GS-13 contract specialist or contracting officer. You want someone in charge of your team who knows what's what. Has it "worked"? Who knows? The government does not track such things, and most agency "success stories" are exaggerations if not outright lies. It has likely succeeded in some cases and failed in others. But it can work in the hands of the right people. Of that I have no doubt. Curious and savvy people can make almost anything work. You're curious. Are you savvy?

Read this: http://www.wifcon.com/articles/BP_21-9_wbox.pdf Don't ask another question here until you read that. Reading it won't answer your questions, but it will help you to answer them for yourself if you are willing to think things through. People who ask questions like yours at a site like this probably think that "quick" answers are available. In this case, they aren't. You have asked about a complicated matter. The questions you have asked are fundamental and can be answered, but they are conceptual, and thus can be answered only at the expense of a lot of time and very careful writing. It's not easy to answer such questions in writing for someone you cannot communicate with directly. They will only have more questions, which will require even more time and careful writing. And writing complicated explanations in this format is exceedingly tedious. You can figure out the answers for yourself by thinking things through, which would be the best way. But that will take time. It's too bad that newbies get so little quality training from their employers.

Emphasis added. My thought is that it's not against the law and might work out well if you know what you're doing. Do you know what you're doing?

You don't conform a contract file. You simply add to it, generally in chronological order. You conform a contract document.

In ordinary English, an entity is "Something that exists as a particular and discrete unit." American Heritage Dictionary, 5th. Black's Law Dictionary, 11th ed., defined it as follows: The definition of segment in FAR 48 CFR 9904 has been cited above. FAR 2.101 contains the same definition, and that section applies throughout the FAR.

As used in government contracting, conformed contract refers to a "tracked changes" copy of a contract document that has been edited to reflect the text of a contract as modified after contract formation. In that sense it is supposed to be a copy of the text of the contract as currently agreed-upon by the parties. A conformed contract is an administrative convenience. It enables the parties to quickly refer to the current text of the contract without having to work through the text of each contract modification. Properly maintained, it is a valuable time-saving mechanism. Poorly maintained it is a nuisance. In any case, it is not an authentic duplication of the contract unless signed by the parties. It is just the maintaining party's assertion of the text of the contract. But see Doyon Utilities LLC v. U.S., 148 Fed.Cl. 69, at 76 (2020), in which the Court of Federal Claims admitted into evidence the text of a conformed copy of a contract over the objections of the plaintiff. The term conformed contract or conformed copy of a contract does not appear in the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) or anywhere else in the Code of Federal Regulations, although it may appear in some agency-specific publications. The term does not appear in Black's Law Dictionary, 11th ed. The term "conformed copy," which does appear in Black's, does not seem to refer to what is meant by the term conformed contract as used in government contracting. I am not aware of any published "commercial" definition.

What kind of service is your company providing? Advisory and assistance? Something else?

Under an FFP service contract, each instance of nonperformance or unacceptable performance of a task that cannot be re-performed is a breach of contract, and the government need not pay for such performance. Now suppose an FFP service contract requires the contractor to perform a service for one year and the CO has developed a CLIN stipulating a quantity/unit of 12 months and a monthly unit price. And suppose further that the SOW requires performance of 10 tasks in each month and that in one particular month the contractor's performance of one of the 10 tasks was unacceptable and cannot be re-performed. The government does not have to pay for the unacceptable performance. As a general rule, the CO could not reduce the contract price by one entire month's payment if the performances of the other nine tasks were acceptable. That would not be reasonable. So, in order to avoid disputes over the amount of payment reductions, the contract should include a schedule showing the amount to be a deducted from each month's payment for each task that was not acceptably performed and cannot be re-performed. Now if the tasks must be performed on a daily basis, the schedule must show how much is to be deducted for each day of unacceptable performance. There is a lot more to this, but you get the idea. Of course, instead of this formulaic approach the parties could take a relational approach. But that requires a lot more knowledge and skill.

See "Fact Sheet on the Continued Thickening of Government" by Paul Light. https://www.brookings.edu/research/fact-sheet-on-the-continued-thickening-of-government/ Light is famous for the book, The True Size of Government, in which he wrote about the "shadow workforce" of contractor personnel. If government sometimes fails us, the "Fact Sheet," though written in 2004, may provide some clues as to why. And the government has probably thickened some more since then,

Why must contracting officers be "given" tools? Hell, why don't they make their own????? The problem is that contracting officers in particular and contracting practitioners in general have not devoted any substantial time to thinking about what they buy when they buy services. FAR reflects government experience buying supplies. There is a 57-word definition of supplies in FAR 2.101, but there is no definition of services. In fact, there is no definition of services anywhere in FAR. The definition in FAR 37.101 is for "service contract," not for services. Yet we spend more money on services now than on supplies. Most contracting officers cannot give a coherent explanation of the concept of services. How many articles have you read from the voluminous literature on the unique problems of buying services? How much time have you spent thinking about the nature of services, about what kind of thing they are, about what all services have in common and of the different species of services? How much time have you spent discussing those things with your colleagues? Hmmm? As a class, contracting practitioners simply do not think deeply about their business. Not much at all, based on the evidence. So we see "lot" "LO" being used as a unit of delivery for services, even though it's generally inappropriate. The same could be said for "month." We see contract line item structures not properly aligned with work statement task structures. We see failures to think through the problem of price reductions for unacceptable task performance and to establish appropriate contract terms to supplement the Inspection of Services clause. I have recommended books and articles about services. I have written a number of published articles about contracting for services. Here are some titles, all of which have appeared in The Nash & Cibinic Report: PERFORMANCE WORK STATEMENTS: The Policymakers' Monster—Where Is Our Theseus? (February 2021) IDIQ CONTRACTS FOR SUPPORT SERVICES: What Are They Really? (October 2018) FIRM-FIXED-UNIT-PRICE vs. TIME-AND-MATERIALS: A Good Alternative For Services Acquisition (April 2015) COMPETITIVE PROPOSALS: What Is Their Predictive Value? (November 2014) SERVICE CONTRACTING: Three Unsolved Problems (November 2011) CONTRACTING FOR SERVICES: Challenges For The Next Generation (December 2010) “TRADECRAFT” IN SERVICES ACQUISITION: DOD's New Policies (November 2010) NONCONFORMING SERVICES: What Are The Government's Rights Under Fixed-Price Service Contracts? (April 2008) SERVICE CONTRACT QUALITY: We've Got More Thinking To Do (March 2008) OBLIGATING FUNDS FOR SERVICES UNDER IDIQ CONTRACTS THAT CROSS FISCAL YEARS: What Are The Rules? (May 2006) THE ACQUISITION ADVISORY PANEL AND PERFORMANCE-BASED SERVICES: A Wasted Year PRICING SERVICE CONTRACTS (May 2005) A CHANCE TO FIX PERFORMANCE-BASED CONTRACTING (April 2005) THE SERVICE CONTRACTING POLICY MESS (November 2001) LONG-TERM SERVICE CONTRACTING IN THE YEAR 2000 AND BEYOND (September 1999) PROMISES, PROMISES: SERVICE CONTRACT COMPETITIONS (November 1997) That list covers 25 years. Yet not one practitioner has taken up one of those articles as a starting point and run with it, not even to say they think it's wrong. Not one practitioner. Not one. But who reads? Who thinks? Who writes down their thoughts? Who shares their thoughts with colleagues? Who devises and experiments with solutions? No bleeping body, that's who! And old-timers like me are getting older every day. We're not going to be around forever. WHO IS GOING TO PICK UP THE BLEEPING BALL? Give tools to contracting officers? Give?

What is it with all these people with G&A issues?

😖 Always keep a notebook and pencil next to your computer!

I cannot answer those questions without a lot more information about the nature of the service in question. I will say, however, that if a service "lot" consists of multiple and various tasks, and if the contractor's performance of only some of the tasks was unacceptable, then I doubt that a board of contract appeals or the Court of Federal Claims would go along with rejection of the entire "lot" and refusal to pay for any of it. If the tasks were independent of one another and could be separated for purposes of QA, then I think that the government could refuse to pay only for the ones for which performance was unacceptable. How the parties would come up with the value of each task is something they would have to work out.

What is the RFP number?

@kburnett4112 Next time, start with a clearly worded question, then go into the background. Starting with a long-winded (and confusing) background is a good way to lose readers before they get to the question. You make the reader's problem worse by not asking a clear question. I could find only one question mark in your post. It comes at the end of this sentence: I think what you are trying to ask is this: If a firm-fixed-price contract or order is for a service with performance and pricing specified by lot, can the buyer reject the entire lot and refuse to pay for any of it if just part of the work was unacceptable? Is that what you want to know?

Yes. Assuming the DPAS clause applies, see FAR 52.216-18, paragraph (b):

Did you mean: If an IDIQ contract has a DPAS rating, does the rating apply to all orders issued thereunder?

Yes. They could protest the terms of the solicitation prior to the proposal due date.