Open Dialogue on Improving How to Do Business with the Federal Government Browse Recent ideas

The Federal Strategic Sourcing Initiative (FSSI) should be on every small business federal contractor's list of issues to quickly be educated upon. The FSSI has been identified as a procurement vehicle which it is expected will be applied to over 90% of all Federal Government Spending. In a nutshell, FSSI awards contracts to a select few while leaving the vast majority at-risk of losing government business. For example, ...more »

The most ironic display of waste in the federal acquisition system is multiple websites referencing the FAR. There needs to be one, and just one, government-run website referencing the FAR with all the benefits of the other sites.

Acquisition.gov/far can do the job of http://farsite.hill.af.mil/vffara.htm in addition to other FAR sites out there.

Contracting officers and specialists spend days each year going through proposal spreadsheets, correcting unintentional errors, and performing price analyses, cost analyses, and cost realism analyses. Technologically, the US is easily at the point where offerors can log into a single, web-based application and key in their data in designated fields. The fields automatically catch adding errors and rounding errors, which ...more »

It is expensive, time consuming and distracting for small businesses to prepare proposals. For some of the larger federal contractors in the Department of Energy, a new method of "Award Term" has been used to reward exemplary performance by addiing additional years to the term of the contract for each year of high performance. This would help many small businesses who often invest a year or two of profit on a three-five ...more »

A significant challenge in procuring cloud-enabled IT services involves structuring an appropriate method of payment. For something simple, like Infrastructure as a Service, agencies should be able to contract directly with a cloud service provider without having to fund upfront (in effect, pre-paying) for a projected level of service consumption. These types of procurement arrangements are typically fixed price. This ...more »

Small Businesses operating in the federal marketplace often find themselves competing against Large Businesses who hold long term Multiple Award Contracts (MACs) that they obtained while they were a small business (SB). These large businesses may be able to compete as a SB in SB Set-Asides, even though they no longer qualify as a SB for the applicable NAICS code per SBA size determination regulation. For example, the ...more »

Many procurements recur every 3-5 years with small deviations in the requirements. FBO provides today's snapshot of opportunities while FPDS provides the historical view - GSA should consider ways to structure data in these systems to better connect today's opportunities with its historical predecessor(s). By understanding how a particular contract unfolded previously could help new entrants better position themselves ...more »

Contracting Officers/Specialists get comfortable processing set aside contracts of a particular type. Some are more comfortable with the WOSB program versus SDVOSB or HUBzone and naturally gravitate towards what they know. We continually face the comment of "if you bring me an 8(a), I can make this happen quickly but I can't give you an estimate for how long it may take otherwise" SBA has an incomplete set of practical ...more »

The Federal Government is always interested to implement activities which are "Best Practices" in the Private Sector. I would like to suggest that one of these "Best Practices" is the Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA). In the Private Sector, whenever a new policy is being considered, a CBA is performed to evaluate whether to proceed with the new policy. Unfortunately, a CBA was never performed for the Federal Strategic Sourcing ...more »

Acknowledging that the acquisition process is frustrating and cumbersome is a start, but to understand how to fix it starts with a willingness to look at the acquisition processes, technologies, and professionals from the perspective of a small business owner. Follow a small business owner's experience with the acquisition system - from the first sources sought to award of a contract - for a specific procurement and ...more »

Notwithstanding the OFPP Act's intent to create a thoughtful,disciplined, and limited regulatory system, Federal agencies have increasingly ignored the system's requirements and proliferated duplicative, conflicting, unnecessary, and ill-designed local requirements that greatly frustrate the contracting community. Most disturbing is the rampant failure to: 1) follow statutory requirements for publicizing and obtaining ...more »

Contracting specialist should be more forthcoming answering questions. It's very hard to have a productive dialogue before and after award.