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.
This online forum allows you the opportunity to post comments and other information that will remain publicly viewable on this website. The site therefore operates a moderation policy to ensure that comments are appropriate and not harmful to others. Comments which include any of the following may be deleted by site administrators:
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.
Finally, in addition to this policy, this site allows individual users to flag ideas as being spam, duplicate, or otherwise inappropriate. When an idea is flagged a sufficient number of times, it is automatically placed into a queue for review by moderators. We reserve the right to remove any posting that receives a sufficient number of "flags" to be placed in this queue, though will not automatically do so.
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Train all government PMs and COTRs on various contract types, to help them with acquisition planning
This is a great idea. Can members of our community add to this by suggesting how Web 2.0 and use of social media can help to accomplish this?
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An initial thought is to consider using webinars to enable subject matter experts and experienced procurement professionals conduct training sessions. These can support career development objectives through mentoring and also offer a means for PMs and COTRs to attend professional development events even if training budgets are tight.
Another option is to consider using a training platform (e.g., Moodle) to create either self-paced or mentored courses that require action from both the students and trainers. While Moodle is one example, it is a good starting point due to low acquisition costs and the possibility of hosting it on a local (i.e., not on a government system) server, if necessary. Ideally, the training environment would create a community of practice that could be encouraged through Twitter, Facebook or other, regional networks. While some issues might be deemed 'procurement sensitive," evaluation of hypothetical situations could be posed as discussion options in groups on social networks as well (thus eliminating the need to centralize the training). However, without some sort of centralized (and evolving) repository for learning materials, it seems that the discussions would simply be varied and unfocused.