Misconception 8 – “If I lose the competition, I shouldn’t bother to ask for a debriefing. The Contracting Officer won’t share any helpful information with me.”
WRONG! Unsuccessful offerors should always ask for a debriefing to understand the award decision and to improve future proposals.
I have been part of many debriefings in my career. Some were pretty beneficial for both sides and some were pretty bloody.
Why would a CO do a debriefing? It’s pretty simple, because they are required to do so if you ask for one.
You can ask for either a pre-award (FAR 15-505) or a post-award debriefing (FAR 15-506). As a CO, I always preferred to do pre-award debriefings. It allowed me to provide feedback to the unsuccessful offerors in enough detail for them to see why they were not going to receive the award. Once they had this information and understood the reasons for being eliminated from the competition, it would often stave off a protest.
A pre-award debriefing provides:
• The agency’s evaluation of significant elements in your proposal;
• A summary of the rationale for eliminating you from the competition; and
• Reasonable responses to relevant questions about source selection procedures.
• Pre-award debriefings shall not disclose (1) The number of offerors; (2) The identity of other offerors; (3) The content of other offerors proposals; (4) The ranking of other offerors; (5) The evaluation of other offerors; or (6) Any of the prohibited information.
So you can find out a LOT of info in a pre-award debrief. Much of this information can really assist you in future proposals. Once you learn what not to do (or what to do), you will develop better proposals.
A post-award debriefing provides:
• Government evaluation of significant weaknesses or deficiencies of your offer;
• Overall evaluated cost/price and technical rating of the successful offeror and your offer, as well as past performance information on your offer;
• Overall ranking of all offerors (if used);
• Rationale for award;
• For commercial items, the make/model of the item of the successful offeror; and
• Reasonable responses to relevant questions about whether source selection procedures contained in the solicitation, applicable regulations, and other applicable authorities were followed
• The debriefing shall not include point-by-point comparisons of the debriefed offeror’s proposal with those of other offerors. And debriefing can’t reveal any information prohibited from disclosure.
As you can see, you can find out more information from a post-award briefing. So it really depends on what information you are looking for as to which debriefing you request. You cannot have BOTH a pre-award AND post-award debriefing.
To request a debriefing you must submit a written request to the CO and the CO determines the method of the debriefing. But if you don’t ask, you won’t know. Asking for a debriefing is the best way to find out why you were not awarded the contract/order.
For COs, there are innovative ways to get the debrief information out to the unsuccessful offerors without them requesting one. In the unsuccessful offeror letter, include all the allowable debrief information. That way they have the same info they would get at a debriefing and ALL unsuccessful offerors have the same info.
A word of caution to contractors. Be very sure you know what to expect at a debriefing before you bring the “big guns”. The most contentious debriefing I was ever involved in was fairly early in my career as a CO. My agency had a recurring service requirement that was technically complex enough that there were only a small handful of technically capable offerors (at that time). So the contract awards tended to bounce back and forth between an extremely small pool of vendors. We made the award decision and found one of the offerors technically unacceptable. This caused a great deal of consternation since the offeror was the incumbent! However one of the go/no go technical factors was providing resumes of key personnel and they had not provided any! So their entire corporate staff was livid and they said they were bringing their legal counsel and CEO in from out of state to the debriefing. I was the CO and Kevin Jans (Skyway President) was the Contract Negotiator. We knew the debrief was going to be a wild ride so we had all our technical folks, our Staff Judge Advocate (JA) legal counsel, and a very well-developed PowerPoint chart pack. The CEO storms in and sits down and we get through all the “blah blah” stuff and get to the technical factors and it’s a pretty empty chart. It shows the technical requirement for the resumes and the “none submitted” underneath and the CEO looks at his project manager and says, “What does that mean? You didn’t submit any resumes?” And the project manager said meekly, “But, Sir, they KNOW who we are.” The CEO stormed out and I felt really bad for the project manager, who I imagine lost his job.
So to sum up – you should ALWAYS ask for a debrief. This valuable information can help you be more competitive on future proposals.
So, this is the last in our series of the top eight myths/misconceptions about Federal contracting. I hope they have provided some food for thought and you have discovered that the government is no longer trying to hide behind regulations and guidelines. Rather, transparency is the order of the day. And that benefits all of us on both sides of the table.