On his first day in office, President Obama challenged leaders in government to "use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector." The acquisition process represents one of the most important areas of collaboration between government and the private sector.
Unfortunately, it is also among the most complex and least transparent. The Better Buy Project is an experiment dedicated to the belief that there's a lot of room for improvement in the way government buys products and services. We're testing this hypothesis by asking for your ideas on how to make acquisition process more open, transparent and collaborative.
The best part of this project is that the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) GSA would really like to adopt some of your best ideas. Promising ideas will be selected by GSA to be piloted on an upcoming acquisition, where lessons learned will be captured for future implementation. But that really depends on us, and the ideas we're able to produce.
This project is concerned primarily with the pre-contract-award stages of the acquisition process—the activities that take place before the government "signs on the dotted line" to buy a product or service. Those areas are:
The ultimate goal is to improve how government learns about and chooses what it buys—in other words, to make government a more informed, more effective consumer.
We are looking for ideas to make federal acquisition more open, transparent, and collaborative. What does that mean?
We believe that making the process more open, transparent and collaborative will make government more likely to end up with the right item at the right price.
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Additionally, while we invite open participation and diverse viewpoints to be shared, moderators reserve the right to remove posts which do not address some aspect of the stated purpose of this forum: To collect ideas about using collaboration and social media to improve the acquisition process. We deeply value your time and input, and our desire is to remove as few posts as possible while ensuring that a focused, constructive discussion takes place.
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This is a common problem that needs to be addressed. Can we expand Richard's initial thought and discuss how Web 2.0 can be used to involve contracting professionals at the appropriate time in the acquisition process?
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J.D.Bailey
End of the year procurements are frequently very important.
If a CO/C*O/Chief keep priorities set right, then the end of the year is when excess funds become available for lower priority essentials (like IT/Services or 2000 desktops, or copier/fax replacements and pallets of paper for next year, or ....)
Many small (hard to plan) essentials go unfunded until you know the funds are not needed for higher mission and deployment priorities.
Not all end of year buys are bad, and many are prudent, because next year....
Also, if the activity is questionable call for an investigation, but just because it is the end of the year rush to buy, don't think that our bosses are just out to spend all the money for no dang good reason. There are many very good reasons for the end of year rush.
Tova Churgin Stein
Perhaps in-house collaboration tools could be used to encourage greater teaming between the relevant parties (requiring office, budget, procurement...) during the planning process, since one problem in planning is that it cannot be done in a vacuum but groups of people do not have time to meet.
DSMITH
And stop all these procurements that are dumped at the end of the year
CSmith, contract specialist
And how about planning to spend funds throughout the year, and not this huge dump of money in the final quarter? The way budgets are handled leads to waste. OMB should step in and mandate equal spending throughout the fiscal year. This will lead to more effective procurements than with the rushed spending that goes on to obligate remaining funds in the fourth quarter. That type of spending should be prohibited.
richard kahn
Much too often COs are left out of the acquisition process until the end. SOWs/PWS should be the shared product of all stakeholders, including COs. Unfortunately, the government is in such a rush to get a contract the acquisition planning phase is often missed and the requirements are frequently inadequately identified. Better planning should result in better requirements definition and a more intelligent approach, saving dollars and ultimately saving time. More effective market research during the planning phase might even identify existing systems that meet the agency's needs.