For Department, Command and Agency leaders, traditional methods have a long track record of legal reliability. Unfortunately, many decades of experience also show that traditional methods have varying levels of success appearing to have a strong inverse correlation to complexity and uncertainty. In other words, the higher the complexity and uncertainty, the lower the probability of success. One of the goals is to “simplify the complex” because history has shown that in Government contracting, complexity and success are often off-setting.
In contrast, some agile methods are new, and without the specific guidance in this series of articles, may be legally risky, but they deliver reliable results with the best cost/schedule/performance profile in procurements that have high complexity and uncertainty.
It will be a challenge moving Government acquisitions from traditional prescriptive processes, with detailed specifications, to discovery processes, with iterative and adaptive methods, because organizations and people must change. They must also embrace the concept of evolution. The traditional model assumes the acquisition strategies that worked before will always work again. That assumption may be flawed.
For example, the acquisition strategy for a $1 billion, multiple award agency-wide contract for knowledge management services that worked in 2008 is not going to be as effective in 2019. Why? For starters, the economy was in free-fall in 2008 and many people were looking for work. Compare that with today. The economy has recovered much of its momentum, unemployment is down again, and payrolls have also officially topped the 2008 levels. People with specialized knowledge of earned value management, engineering, program management, cost estimating, etc. are now, once again, in demand in the commercial market. There are many variables impacting these differences, and many of them have to do with the passage of time. With agile strategies in place, agencies and contractors are well-positioned to adapt to the specific needs of the acquisition –saving time and resources for both Government and Industry.
To succeed in Agile Government Contracting, leaders in both the Contracting and Program Management communities will need to build strong partnerships and jointly implement Agile methods. “Success” here is defined as reducing the resources (time and money) necessary for the Government to procure goods and services. Using the resources we must procure the best products and services at the best price is a more reasonable (and effective) goal than simply throwing more resources at the problem. Many times, more resources just lead to more complexity. Guidelines for how to do so within the regulations will be detailed later in this series.