More from the Acquisition Advisory Panel draft report

Two more articles provide more information about the SARA panel's decisions. First, the panel believes that by using commercial business practices, competition will increase. Here how the article puts it

...move away from time-and-materials contracts because they take too much effort to oversee. Instead, the panel favors performance-based acquisitions. But other significant recommendations include setting up a new General Services Administration schedule for professional services, redefining stand-alone commercial services, applying the three-bid minimum requirement for Defense Department services over the simplified acquisition threshold governmentwide, and amending the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) to improve transparency in government contracting.

The second article says the panel believes that the acquisition workforce doesn't know who it is and that they are not being sufficiently trained. In addition, they will conduct a study to see, among other things, whether there should be a government-wide version of DAU.

Of course, since DAU has an organic "systems acquisition" leaning (notice who their Defense AT&L Magazine is aimed at), they are missing helping those of us who spend the other 60% of federal procurement dollars!

From their writer's guidelines at the end of the magazine:

The purpose of Defense AT&L magazine is to instruct members of the DoD acquisition, technology & logistics (AT&L) workforce and defense industry on policies, trends, legislation, senior leadership changes, events, and current thinking affecting program management and defense systems acquisition [my italics], and to disseminate other information pertinent to the professional development and education of the DoD Acquisition Workforce.

Perhaps a services acquisition university might be a good thing. Let's see what they propose.

Looking at the big picture of PBSA

The Procurement Round Table is a group of procurement folks who meet to try to make sense of federal contracting and how to make it better. Earlier this year, this group issued a white paper to the acquisition advisory panel, working on improving services acquisition.

The paper introduced the concept of "relational contracting" for discussion purposes. The other purpose of the paper is to help explain why services contracting is supposed to be performance-based but often is performance based in name only.

Looking at the members of the Round Table and the members of the AAP, there is a lot of overlap. Maybe they are just trying to encourage discussion amongst the rest of us.

So...what do you think?

Thanks to Mary Paige for pointing this white paper out to me.

New Acquisition Advisory Panel Report is drafted.

The Acquisition Advisory Panel, formed as a result of the Services Acquisition Reform Act of 2003 (SARA) has put together its draft report. Youmay have seen discussions of it in various places. One such place is Steven Kelman's column in FCW.com. He is starting a series of discussions about the report. This report drew the opposition of panel member Marshall J. Doke.

FYI, other board members are:

• Louis M. Addeo, President, AT&T Government Solutions;
• Frank J. Anderson, Jr., President, Defense Acquisition University;
• Allan V. Burman, President, Jefferson Solutions and former Administrator for Federal Procurement Policy;
• Carl DeMaio, President and Founder of the Performance Institute;
• David Drabkin, Deputy Associate Administrator for Acquisition Policy, General Services Administration;
• Jonathan Etherton, Vice President, Legislative Affairs, Aerospace Industries Association of America, Inc., and former staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee;
• James A. Hughes, Jr., Deputy General Counsel for Acquisition, Department of the Air Force;
• Deidre A. Lee, Director of Management and Chief Acquisition Officer for the Federal Emergency Management Agency;
• Tom Luedtke, Assistant Administrator for Procurement, National Aeronautics and Space Administration;
• Marcia G. Madsen, Partner, Mayer, Brown, Rowe and Maw, and past Chair of the ABA Section of Public Contract Law;
• Melanie R. Sabelhaus, Deputy Administrator, Small Business Administration;
• Joshua I. Schwartz, Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Government Procurement Law Program, George Washington University Law School;
• Roger D. Waldron, Director, Acquisition Management Center, General Services Administration.
• Laura Auletta, Chairperson of the Civilian Agency Acquisition Council, will serve as the Panel’s Designated Federal Officer (Executive Director).

You are welcome to read the draft and the two columns that pick at the decisions. I think that services acquisition is so important that it rates it's own Aquisition University (DAU is for systems acquisition). Since DoD spends as much on services as systems, it is that important!

Strategic sourcing comes to procurement of services

This is the next step in the consolidation and bundling of services- without using the words consolidation and bundling. This is a natural progression. We do it ourselves. We figure out what we need a lot of and buy it in bulk at Costco or Sam's Club or BJ's Wholesale. We don't have a lot of personal experince at services...perhaps if neighbors shared a lawn service, they may get a cheaper rate. I may have to think a little longer on a services example.

Regardless, it may be a good thing for federal procurement, but preference programs and overseers will not let this occur easily.