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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Create a platform for industry to solicit questions associated with a solicitation that also enables government to post the answers to the questions. Could use this tool during all three components of the pre-award phase to provide industry with more information to make bid/no-bid decisions and would also enable government to better define requirements.
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Chris Hamm
The process that I am used to has a deadline for all vendor questions, and then the Government takes the questions, reformats them into one response, and then attempts to answer every question (or choose to not answer, as it were). This process is not very timely or responsive, but clearly meets the overall test for "fairness" to all parties.
I am trying to imagine a more iterative process (e.g., like Dan's reference to eBay). I am curious to hear industry opinion on what would happen if the Government required the vendors to identify themselves (vice anonymous questions). I can see benefits to allowing anonymous questions, as it would likely yield more meaningful questions, but with the risk of potentially becoming inundated with more questions than the Government could feasibily respond, or excessive questions from one interested vendor trying to influence the procurement.
I am also curious about having a live window for a few hours where anyone could ask a questions, and then the Government would respond during the window on a website immediately. What impact would this have?
Ravi Bhave
GSA Ebuy is if the buyer answers the questions on time. My experience in some cases is the buyer answers to questions just 2 days before the close of the bid and they wont even extend the time. This according to me is not fair.
vinay.raman
Put question responses on a pre-set schedule (i.e. once weekly all answered questions will be answered)
Green Proposals
Utilizing a pre-bid conference via webinar is the answer. there is a facilitator who charges the vendor a nominal fee and allows everyone to ask questions, get answers and within an hour have an electronic copy of the meeting with a list of attendees. This method makes the entire process more efficient and effective and saves natural resources at the same time. Included in the fee is the ability to submit proposals electronically through a safe and secure environment.
Peter G. Tuttle, CPCM
Do you believe this would replace the current method for asking and answering questions, which tends to be a more formal solicitation amendment-centric process. The current process allows everyone (generally speaking) to see the Q&A but it is pretty structured. Would the advantage of your suggestion be to create a more time-sensitive Q&A process which might promote greater understanding of requirements as well as possibly save some time?
Dan Munz
Cool idea. eBay actually does this well; potential bidders
can ask questions about an item, and everyone can see the answers.