2. Procurement Rules and Practices
Not to be derogatory but the government needs to hire more
(knowledgeable) buyers and contracting officers and engineers. This has a big impact on delays and delivery schedule.
2. Procurement Rules and Practices
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 »
3. Small Business Participation
FBO should list correct Product and Service Codes from the FPDS Manual found at http://www.acquisition.gov/PSC%20Manual%20-%20Final%20-%2011%20August%202011.pdf If the codes could be validated before posting, it would help small businesses locate appropriate opportunities. For example, it would be easier for a roofer to locate a roofing contract if the FBO announcement is coded with a 'Y' or 'Z' designation, instead ...more »
2. Procurement Rules and Practices
The FAR currently contemplates two solutions to resolve the impact of corporate acquisitions and/or reorganization on federal contractors under the Anti-Assignment Act: the Novation process and a Name Change agreement. We propose that a third avenue be established to address situations in which, due to internal restructuring, the legal entity has changed but the parent company remains the same. In these instances, ...more »
2. Procurement Rules and Practices
Protests are expensive for industry to process and for the government to defend against. The government can reduce the likelihood of protests and improve the effectiveness of the procurement process by providing training to officials involved in solicitation preparation, proposal evaluation, and source selection on lessons already learned. For example, GAO’s Bid Protest Annual Report to Congress for FY2013 noted that ...more »
Government reporting systems have a tendency to grow over time without an overall design or architecture. As a consequence they can quickly become an alphabet soup of acronyms, with indecpherable connections and frustratingly different methods and rules of entry and extraction. A good example of this is the confusing jumble of systems that make up the government's past performance/integrity system. Suggest that systems ...more »
2. Procurement Rules and Practices
Despite a growing body of evidence that fixating on costs actually increases them, acquisition personnel insist on making every transaction cost-based. Sections 2379 and 2306a(d) of Title 10, USC, for instance, provide limited authority to obtain cost and pricing information for major weapons systems and their component parts where certified cost data are not required. This authority is over-applied in practice and ...more »
2. Procurement Rules and Practices
In addition to requiring a pre solicitation phase in all procurements over a certain threshold to be determined by Agency Contracting Head, I would recommend a more involved use of performance based acquisition practices for initial strategy adoption and O&M efforts in information technology. This includes the occasional coupling with incentive based contracting where appropriate. When these parts of the FAR are used ...more »
2. Procurement Rules and Practices
There is no reason for proposal instructions to not match evaluation criteria, which happens more often than not. This should be a required quality check for any procurement, as it will facilitate the proposal writing and the proposal evaluation process. This simple requirement will result in time and cost savings across the board.
3. Small Business Participation
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 »
3. Small Business Participation
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 »
3. Small Business Participation
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 »