I have to be honest.

When I was a contracting officer, there were plenty of times I really liked the contractors I had. The acquisition team and I often would have preferred to have long-term relationships with the contractors we had. It’s human nature to want to keep working with the people we already knew and liked.

However, most government contracts need to be regularly re-competed. To the dismay of many, this competitive process created inefficiencies. It made us switch contractors more often than we really wanted to. It cost both the government acquisition team and the contractors time, energy and money to re-compete our contracts. It all seems wasteful and inefficient. For example,

– Our customer (the user) saw re-competitions as a hassle. They often liked the product or service they already had. That’s why they picked the contractor in the first place.

– The incumbent contractor saw re-competition as a business risk. They had to re-win the work they already had. This was expensive and time consuming.

– The taxpayer (watching from the sidelines) saw this process as too lengthy, costing way too much, and being wrought with bureaucracy.

Why all the hassle? Why all the inefficiency?

Because competition is not supposed to be efficient. This sounds like a simple concept to grasp, right? This is a challenging notion to swallow when you are the one who has to compete for the work and survive the gauntlet of competitive processes. The challenge is exacerbated by the fact that we humans (including COs, program managers, customers, government leaders, contractors, Congress and the American taxpayer) all want this process to be done faster and cost less. We crave efficiency.

Some argue that sole source contracts are more ‘efficient’. I vehemently disagree. 90% or more of the sole source contracts I awarded (for a variety of reasons) ended up being more work to administer, taking longer, costing more, and were generally less successful when viewed in the entire contract life cycle. We may have awarded them faster, but we traded that time for a lot more work post award. Not that I have an opinion…

I’ll save my discussion for the fallacies of sole source contracts for another day.  Even with that, nearly 70% of contracts are competed so let’s just focus on those…

Here’s the bad news: doing competition properly will usually cost more and take longer…up front.

Here’s the good news: after that up front investment in time and resources, we more often (though not always, I’ll admit) got better products, better service, better capability and better value.

Can it be more efficient that it is now? Of course it can. For some of my ideas on how, check out the Contracting Officer Podcast (http://contractingofficerpodcast.com).

Finally, if you are inherently frustrated by this inefficiency, I’ll need to be brutally honest with you: the government market may not be for you. To succeed in the federal market, my suggestion is that you learn to want to compete. That way, you won’t be surprised when you have to.