Skyway Wire
Market Research (Pricing Perspective)
People new to federal contracting get introduced to market research as a rather generic description of the government’s efforts to determine a fair and reasonable price range for a required item. ...
Price Reasonable Determinations
A big part of making an award decision by the contracting officer is determining price reasonableness. Depending on the complexity of the procurement this can entail a very simple analysis or hours...
“Sorry Letters,” or Notices to Unsuccessful Offerors
Over the holidays I was thinking about “Sorry Letters,” or their official term, Notifications to Unsuccessful Offerors. I had previously authored a series of articles on Exchanges with Industry,...
Staffing Levels
Performance-based contracts for services focus on the performance outcomes and the contractor’s ability to meet or exceed standards; however, regardless of unique methods that may be used, it is...
Agile Government Contracting – Part 5 of a Series
Department, Command and Agency leaders must also champion the generally accepted wisdom that lean principles, the intellectual source of agile practices, can be applied to Government acquisitions of...
Closing the Deal
Negotiations in government contracting can be an interesting subject. In my years as a CO, almost every contracting officer I knew had a different approach to conducting negotiations. I grew up in...
Agile Government Contracting – Part 4 of a Series
Command and Agency leaders must understand the changing reality where they find themselves operating. Technology-driven process improvement means the cost of exploration and experimentation has been...
Doing What’s Right, For Both Sides of the Contract
In one of my first official contract actions in Afghanistan in 2007, I made a common but avoidable mistake, and the result serves as a good lesson for both industry and government contracting...
Agile Government Contracting – Part 3 of a Series
“What does Agile mean?” Agile means using any of the lean principles that improve the probability of a successful procurement in an environment of high complexity and uncertainty. Agile uses the...
Waiting……Waiting…..
At the beginning of the movie "Casablanca," the narrator explains the journey that the lucky ones make through Africa to the free world during World War II. "The others," he says, "wait in...
Agile Government Contracting – Part 2 of a Series
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...
Strategic Sourcing
One area of federal government acquisition that has always fascinated me is the concept of “strategic sourcing.” The Office of Secretary of Defense (OSD) website defines strategic sourcing as the...
Agile Government Contracting – Part 1 of a Series
At the highest levels, Government contracting and Project Management share two approaches – Traditional and Agile. For many years, the Government has been trying to adopt and adapt Agile practices...
The Government Isn’t Always Right
We’ve all heard the expression “The customer is always right…” which may have a place in customer service but should not be blindly adopted in the performance of government contracts. In a recent...
When the Kids Fight
The US Government is dysfunctional when it comes to budget matters. In the years that I worked for USG it seem that just about every year the budget would not be agreed to at the start of the...
Government’s Evolving Approach to Commercial Items
I have penned a few articles on issues involving the commerciality of various items being procured by the US Government. Basically, the idea is that if the seller can show that an item is...