It’s hurricane season here in Florida (Dorian is on its way to the East coast of Florida). Well, it’s hurricane season everywhere I suppose, we just seem to be more aware of it “down here.” My point is I had hurricanes on my mind when I made the connection for this metaphor: storm surge and proposal planning.

One of our Skyway team members was talking about the “waves of proposal work” building as we head into the heart of the 4^th quarter of the government fiscal year. As RFPs are delayed, for a variety of reasons, the waves of upcoming work tend to pile up. This piling up is particularly acute in the 4^th quarter because the impending end of the Fiscal Year drives government offices to slide the RFP release to the right…but keep the due date of the proposals static.

This leads to a lot of anxiety (and frustration) as the expectations of industry don’t tend to align with the government team’s release schedule. As we mentioned on the podcast and elsewhere, there are many factors that cause an RFP to be delayed (that’s a rabbit trail for another blog post and/or podcast). In my experience, the biggest factor is, ironically, the lack of experience managing RFPs and awards in the specific circumstances of each acquisition. As a contracting officer, the times when I grossly underestimated the time it would take to get a contract awarded were because I simply did not have enough resources to do it or there was a new set of rules that had been imposed since the last time I awarded a contract.

For example, I was awarding a $2 million sole source contract at the end of the fiscal year (I started in late July) and planned 60 days to get the RFP out to the company, get a proposal back, negotiate the proposal, then write, review, and get approval for the Justification & Approval (see podcast 009), as well as the actual contract. My counterpart at the contractor (a small business) had his own wickets to navigate to get approval for a price and schedule we had negotiated. All was going according to plan, until we discovered that a new rule about releasing a J&A publicly had just taken effect. I’m not talking about posting that we were awarding a sole source contract (that wasn’t a new practice). This was posting the actual J&A for the world to see and judge.

Just like that, I had a new approval process where legal, operational security, etc. all wanted to see the J&A and “redact” (legalese for black out) anything that was not releasable. Then we had to debate the definition of “releasable” and was any of it classified (that alone led to a heated debate). The debate even included whether I should have asked the contractor for a proposal BEFORE I had posted the J&A publicly. NOTE: I’m glad I did. Otherwise we wouldn’t have made the end of FY deadline.

We started the journey to award the sole source contract on July 15-ish, expecting an award by Sep 15 (60 days later with little stress, as planned). The story has a happy ending (ish), we only lost 2 weeks dealing with the policy of releasing the J&A.

Should I have known about the requirement to publish the J&A? Sure.

Should I have started earlier? Of course.

Hindsight is 20/20.

Here’s the takeaway: while I was busy navigating the slings and arrows of my agency’s acquisition policies to award a sole source contract…it never dawned on me how the delay was affecting the small business I was awarding the contract to. As I needed additional info, they jumped and gave it to me. I was creating storm surge as we marched toward the end of the FY together, and while I was swimming through some deep water, I was floating on top of it, riding it toward the shore. The contractor was standing on the shore, arms spinning, trying to swim against the flow coming in.

And I was oblivious to it.

The good news: you now know why contracting officers can seem callous to the plight of industry having to respond to so much activity at the end of fiscal year.

The bad news: don’t expect them to be aware of it. Fair or not.