In my recent "management fiasco" entry, i reported that the intern retention rate at the organization I visited was only 20 percent. I have been corrected. The rate was 25 percent.I feel so much better. Don't you?
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Vern Edwards' Blog
During a recent visit to a federal agency contracting shop, I was told that the retention rate among contracting interns has thus far been twenty percent. Twenty percent! Although the rate is lower than I expected, I am not entirely surprised.I talk to a lot of contracting interns. What strikes me about them is that they are they are well-educated by...
Bureaucracy has been a pejorative term for a long time.QUOTE The terms bureaucrat, bureaucratic, and bureaucracy are clearly invectives. Nobody calls himself a bureaucrat or his own methods of management bureaucratic. These words are always applied with an opprobrious connotation. They always imply a disparaging criticism of persons, institutions, or proc...
When and why should a contracting officer go to a lawyer?
Posted by Vern Edwards,
13 April 2009
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890 views
When and why should a contracting officer go to a lawyer? The way that a contracting person answers that question will tell you what they think about the role and the responsibility of the contracting officer.I often ask contracting personnel in my classes how they would determine what the rule is about this or that. Very often, too often, the answer is:...
What if you held a competition and everybody won? Did you have a competition?As reported at Federaltimes.com, GSA finally awarded its "Alliant" small business governmentwide acquisition contract on March 27. (Bob reported this in his blog yesterday.) The procurement had held up by a protest to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, which GSA lost. See...
On January 28, 2009, the U. S. Court of Federal Claims awarded Alabama Aircraft Industries, Inc., (formerly Pemco Aeroplex, Inc.) $1,003,288.38 in bid and proposal costs, because of errors committed by the Air Force in the conduct of a source selection for scheduled depot maintenance of KC-135 tanker aircraft. See Alabama Aircraft Industries, Inc.-Bi...
GWU Professor Steve Schooner and his colleague Chris Yukins have written an article that Bob has posted on the Wifcon homepage: Public Procurement: Focus on People, Value for Money and Systematic Integrity, Not Protectionism. In it they say:QUOTE Governments should invest stimulus resources in rebuilding their professional acquisition workforces ⎯ a...
On March 4, the White House Office of the Press Secretary released a memo from the president to the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies⎯Subject: Government Contracting. Here are some highlights and my reactions.QUOTE Since 2001, spending on Government contracts has more than doubled, reaching over $500 billion in 2008. During this same...
On February 18, the Office of Management and Budget issued a memorandum to agencies providing guidance about implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Public Law 111-5. The guidance included the following broad objectives:QUOTE ? Funds are awarded and distributed in a prompt, fair, and reasonable manner; ? The recipients...
The "Neutral" Rule and the Evaluation of Experience
Posted by Vern Edwards,
23 February 2009
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1,292 views
In his February 10 blog entry, Don Acquisition reviewed the history of the so-called "neutral" rule for evaluation of past performance during source selection. I want to continue the examination of that "rule" in terms of the relationship between experience and past performance as evaluation factors.First, the true expression of the "n...
A little intellectual curiosity can take you a long way.My first weeks on the job as a contracting intern were very frustrating. I wasn't frustrated by the contracting rules, which in those days were in the Armed Services Procurement Regulation (ASPR). No, what bothered me was that I didn't understand the products and services I was buying.I was h...
I teach a lot of interns and there is one thing that I notice about them that bothers me: Most of the ones that I have met do not know how to make effective presentations. When asked to present their position on some matter, they do not make their case in an orderly way. When asked to speak, they speak haltingly and in an inaudible voice and look at the p...
Here is an eclectic and idiosyncratic list of some things I found on the internet that may be of interest to my literate and intellectually curious professional readers. All are available free online. If a link doesn't work, Google the title and look through the results. REPORTS/STUDIES? Acquisition in Transition: Workforce Oversight and Mission ? Th...
Still seeking the holy grail: source selection simplification
Posted by Vern Edwards,
19 January 2009
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1,012 views
The Director of Defense Procurement has launched an initiative to simplify DOD's source selection process. Here is how he explained the intitiative in a recent PowerPoint presentation:QUOTE Problem/Process/End GameProblem Statement: Source selections are getting increasingly more complex, requiring volumes of documentation to justify each selection de...
Bob posted a report on the homepage last week: The Challenge of Contracting for Large Complex Projects: A Case Study of the Coast Guard's Deepwater Program. It says that when the government hires a contractor to develop a system that is comprised of independent systems that must work together, the job is so complex and entails so much uncertainty and...
Let's give them something to talk about. A little mystery to figure out. -- Bonnie RaittHere's a little mystery (at least to me) about FAR's implementation of the Truth in Negotiations Act (TINA).I. BackgroundSuppose that the government negotiated a $100 million firm-fixed-price contract after obtaining the submission and certification of...
I recently participated in a conference at which a former senior government official bragged about the bright young people that the government is recruiting into the contracting career field. Here is a story that might give you an idea about what a challenge it is going to be to retain the best of the new recruits.My wife used to manage a contracting shop...
The rules of the contracting business can be Byzantine.If you haven't read it already, read the GAO's decision in Pond Security Group Italia, JV, B-400149.3, December 22, 2008. Bob has posted it on the Wifcon home page.The procurement was for security services at U.S. Army bases in Italy. The protester did not follow instructions in the RFP to pro...
Source selection is a rather straightforward problem, yet some agencies insist upon making a mess of it. They go out of their way to make their lives needlessly difficult when it comes to picking a contractor. Consider the case that I wrote about last Friday. NASA's problem, so beautifully exposed in the Wackenhut decision, is their antiquated approac...
Every now and then (actually, more often than that) an agency conducts a source selection in a way that stupefies me. Such is the case with NASA's $1.62 billion source selection for protective services at 14 NASA sites, such as the Kennedy Space Center. The contract was to be a firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery indefinite-quantity (IDIQ), fo...
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