Contracting Officer Podcast 2.0 Episodes
As former Federal Contracting Officers who have also walked in industry’s shoes, Kevin and Paul share their expertise and perspectives in support of the podcast’s mission: Make government contracting better, one contract at a time.
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443 – What is Pre-Acquisition? (part 1)
Kevin and Paul have covered a LOT of topics on this podcast. In each of the episodes, they map out where a particular topic fits within the Acquisition and/or Execution Time Zones®. (NOTE: For more...
442 – What are Foreign Military Sales?
The United States government buys a wide variety of things in a variety of ways. In this episode, we cover one of those unique ways: through Foreign Military Sales (FMS). Under FMS, the US...
441 – Why is this Inherently Governmental?
We talked in episode 440 about how the government awards contracts for lots of services – unless those services are “inherently governmental activities”. We outlined the definition of that in...
440 – Hiring from the Same Labor Pool
The US government decided a long time ago to contract out as many services as possible, except for the ones that are “inherently governmental services” (see episode 195 for those). However, the...
439 – Federal vs. State / Local Contracting (w/Troy Francis)
Is federal contracting really that different from state and local contracting? In this episode, Kevin welcomes Troy Francis to the podcast to help answer that question. Troy knows the nuances of...
438 – GovCon Conventions
Chess is one of my favorite games. It’s simple, yet maddeningly complex. Chess is a game in which it’s easy to get the basics: there are only 6 types of pieces. However, the game gets complicated...
437 – Finding Contract Awards w/Shelley
There are several places in the FAR that direct contracting officers to award products and services against existing contracts BEFORE establishing new ones. There is even a specific provision that...
436 – What is Acquisition Planning?
Wanting to award a contract and having a path to make award are two different things. The government needs to acquire goods and services. Even when the government customer clearly knows what they...
435 – Sole Source Awards
A Sole Source contract award is when the government awards a contract without competition. The standard procedure in GovCon is to use competition to compete requirements, therefore awarding a sole...
434 – Agency Protest with Shelley Hall
The Agency Protest is yet another communication tool available to industry to engage with the government team. It’s one of the ways – and it has it’s place. First though, we recommend straight up,...
433 – Contract Length
How long can a government contract be? Most contracts are awarded to meet ongoing requirements. Therefore, it makes sense to have a contract in place to cover that requirement at all times. However,...
432 – Protestor Types
A protest is the formal process for offerors to challenge the way the government awards a contract. It’s like having check and balances built into the contracting “system”. However, protests tend...
431 – Contingency Contracting (Part 1)
“Government contracting” is a broad phrase. There are many types of contracts, and types of contracting that fit under Government Contracts. One of the lesser known types of contracting is...
430 – Advisory Multi-Step Process
Government and industry are “encouraged to communicate” in the FAR…that’s nice…but how do they do that? How can the government and industry teams actually execute that “encouragement”? What exactly...
429 – Advisory Downselect with Trevor Wagner
One of the best ways to improve acquisition outcomes is for Government and Industry to communicate. Open communication is one of the key concepts we focus on in our podcast, as well as Skyway’s...
428 – Thresholds
The federal acquisition regulation (FAR) is chockablock with “thresholds” – a threshold is the term for a specific numbers (usually dollar a specific dollar amount) that requires specific action....