formerfed

This reminds me of something I read from a senior manager. He stressed how important empowerment, training, and trust is. The gauge he uses for his personal management performance on these areas is his golf score. When he has sufficiently trained and empowered his subordinates, he can take off a lot of time for golfing. He doesn’t need to worry about the job not being done and his golf improves.

Great article, Vern. Thanks for posting it. I hope a few read it, get motivated, and change their outlook on their jobs a little differently. This excerpt is a compelling message for those seeking employment and for managers seeking the best hires:

There’s no better advice for those interested in advancing their career. Right now there’s a mass of confusion out there. The workforce is largely risk adverse. It looks for regulations to be broken down into detailed instructions and precise steps to be take. The majority want to physically see what works so they can copy for their assigned tasks. So not much has happened thus far with the RFO. A few hopefully will see the light. They will do as Vern states - study, learn, and explain to others. I’ll add they will seize the opportunity to apply the revised process to newly selected contracting assignments. They do this before all the policy, analysts, and writers of procurement instructions spend months producing something. They then become the “experts” others turn to including the policy writers. The bulk of the workforce needs led with examples and told the steps to follow. I think that’s largely due to the risk adverse environment created. 25 years ago, Performance Based Acquisition was in vogue. Despite the push to adopt it, not much initially happened because people waited for someone else to take the lead. The company I worked for had knowledge and experience in helping craft the Seven Steps process. Once the word got out we could assist, we had to turn away work due to the demand. The 1102 community wanted someone to tell and show them how to proceed. Another example concerns when the government tried Zero Based Budgeting. Few at the operational level knew what it was about. A newly hired young employee became interested and read, studied, and asked questions. Despite her age, she quickly became recognized as the expert. She saw what’s needed to be done to succeed from that experience and advanced applying that same inquisitive nature to everything she did. She rose to an SES position within record time. To address Carls point, it’s more than just being nimble and flexible. It’s grasping beneficial concepts, studying and inquiring, developing insights and understandings on what needs done to apply, and taking the lead in doing the work as well as continual application throughout your career.

This site contains many of the historical documents affecting our profession. It starts with the 1955 Hoover Commission Report and goes up to the present. https://procurementroundtable.org/#history

@Vern Edwards I would work closely with the program official official who needed help in preparing the SOW. I always liked collaborating with program officials in preparing the SOW and other documents.

AI is most useful in its current stage of development for instructing preparation of items like SOW. It doesn’t produce a complete document by any means but it provides examples, instructions, and means to complete through iterative prompts. I just played around with a SOW for help desk services. ChatGPT provided a simple template which is good to convey what’s needed. Gemini, which is what Google uses, is more informative and referred to examples from HHS and others. Claude gave the closest to a finished product. If I were a CO and had a program office official who looked for help in drafting a SOW, AI can help. Of course, I would need to work closely as the document went through to final. The nice aspect is it avoids copying from other documents which may not be relevant.

You are not alone. The complexity results from a host of varying solutions to changing legal, regulatory, technological, and marketplace conditions. It’s a matter of considering what’s currently happening, “how can we make the Schedules attractive for continual and even greater use?“ So the result is a maze resulting from band-aid revisions. There are lots of complaints from buying agencies - too complicated to follow the rules, prices aren’t good, don’t want to pay the hidden 0.75% GSA fees, and want to utilize their own teams and conditions. Still I find them very beneficial in the right situations. For example, instead of establishing a pool multiple award contracts for supplies or services which might take several months maybe running into a year, award BPAs under the Schedules. One simply does market research, identifies three of four capable sources, and you’re done.

I may not fully understand. But are you asking if it’s okay to develop non-commercial applications using commercial software licenses/tools? Is the office developing the applications government? Or is the office a commercial entity where the application is integrated with the commercial license?

There are many odd appearing actions. But this one is really surprising to me. VA just released a new solicitation for Community Managed Healthcare. The resulting contracts are for 10 years in duration valued at $1 trillion. The solicitation is for commercial items using a combined solicitation/synopsis. There are approximately 40 attachments. https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/7b2734002e4048bfa2ac4cc5b0479930/view The synopsis says “The Government will award a Firm-Fixed Price plus Incentives, Multiyear, Multiple Award, Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity contract resulting from this solicitation to the Offerors whose proposal conforms to the solicitation and represents the best value to the government.” The proposal response time seems very compressed. The synopsis was posted four days ago. Offeror questions are due Jan 6 with a pre proposal conference on Jan 22. Proposals are due March 15. A trillion dollar procurement using a combined solicitation/synopsis with a 90 day proposal due date! Then there’s the contract type of firm-fixed-price plus incentives multiple award IDIQ!

Going back in this thread, here’s an interesting comment about tools to track I copied from another forum: Flywheel of Failure: Stop Managing Programs. Start Managi...Mark says it best - government CULTURE "... rewards the perfect management of a failure, rather than the messy iteration of a success." We need to embrace OUTCOMES over process. Battlefield success“And I can tell you, with absolute certainty, that there is almost zero correlation between a program marked "Green" on a PowerPoint slide and a piece of software that actually works for the mission. This is the enduring flywheel of failure facing the Department of Defense (DoD) today. We are culturally addicted to Program Management—the administration of contracts, schedules, and compliance artifacts. But we are starving for Product Management—the relentless pursuit of value, quality, and user satisfaction. We have built a system that rewards the perfect management of a failure, rather than the messy iteration of a success”

So true. The RFO provides a means for someone to shine. While others sit back and wait for additional guidance, detailed policy memorandums, examples to copy, and see that’s it fine to proceed, a few will see the opportunity to be a pioneer. They will just jump in and use RFO now. Those will be looked at as taking bold actions and not timid. They will be in demand. Others will be eager to listen to or read what they have to say. I know already what the typical reactions to this will be - “wish I could but I can’t do that where I work.” If you are motivated, you’ll just be able to do it. I saw this in another site on a completely different topic. But it’s relevant here. “While your organization debates strategies, policies, governance, and pilot plans….you could be operating in expert mode.”

Excellent thoughts! This seems like a great theme for an article or class. Very motivational.

Some of this stuff is really beneficial and saves time and frustration. For example a contract specialist needs a funding requisition. They can quickly check to see status and where it’s at in the approval process. If it’s urgent they can speed it up. Or a contractor wants to know status of an invoice. The contract specialist can quickly track the invoice down and spot reasons for possible delay. Another example one can see how much money remains on a contract in real time. A manager can look at how many expiring contracts come up for renewals. What actions are exceeding PALT. I know 1102s spend too much time with automation and blindly follow what contract writing systems produce without detailed verification. This also leads them to not knowing over time what clauses say and mean. They just go with what the system produces. Unfortunately it will get worse, especially with AI capabilities getting better and better. Edit: Vern, I was writing this response and didn’t see your latest post. I agree.

Good question, dave2025. As a point of clarification for the entire discussion for everyone, PRISM is a very robust system and contract writing is just one component. Some other pieces including requisitions, workflow processing, contract management/administration support, vendor management, FPDS input, and financial integration. The financial portion is very important to some agencies because it allows seamless interface with accounting and financial systems. All this means is someone with all these components can initiate and track requisitions, apply funds certification (only authorized users while others can view), create solicitation and award documents, track invoices and payments including line-by-line account reconciliation, and initiate closeout. The interface also allows easier creation of dashboards if that’s of importance to offices.

DHS and GSA apparently have success with PRISM. DoD is starting to use it as well. You might have your technical experts contact DHS for advice.