WhoKnows

Vern, Is what you are contemplating the Labor, ODC/Material obtained for a proposed total price(cost + fee)? For example with labor: Company A bids $100,000 and will provide a total of 100 hours of labor while Company B bids $100,000 and will only provide 95 hours of labor. Would seem pretty straight forward on the surface but then you could start weighting the value of the Prices and Labor to be performed at a more granular level (i.e. LCats, amount of hours assigned to those LCats, etc).

My 2 cents is if you are with a company that is giving you opportunities to grow and gain higher level experiences, max it out as much as possible (if the experiences align with your end goal/career). Even if you are jumping every 2-3 years for title and monetary growth at some point you may plateau and need the time for the additional experiences to catch up with you prior to reaching your goal. Not every place will let you be as involved as you may want to be so passing up a company that is giving you the experiences for the title could slow you down some in the long term.

Your right and I should have been more specific. What I was trying to convey by providing that GAO case was that unless you had a true technical discrepany, (like the great example you provided regarded the Sealed Bidding scenario), you could not determine a proposal as technically unacceptable by utilizing Price Realism where it was not listed in a RFP (at least that is how I interpreted the decision). I agree that while competition does cover the requirements of determining of "Fair and Reasonable" it makes sense to still investigate if a price would seem to good to be true to avoid potential default or a product that does not meet expectations.

I thought this recent decision was interesting and worth sharing http://www.gao.gov/assets/680/673709.pdf . GAO sustained this protest on for a LPTA solicitation because the RFQ did not reference that price realism would be an evaluation criteria and the Government deemed the lowest bidder as technicall unacceptable on concerns of LOE risk for a fixed price effort.