Being a contracting officer (CO) is a unique position. I’ve been asked over the years to describe what it’s like to be a CO. While my opinion may not align with every CO, this is my attempt to help people understand why I enjoyed it so much – and why I’ve dedicated my post-government professional efforts to helping people better understand the role of the CO. I have a huge list of reasons that outpaced the ‘blog-sized’ content I’m targeting. So, I am focusing on one reason at a time.
Reason 5: I got to be creative.
I suspect this one is going to hit people as odd. The conventional wisdom is that COs are just shuffling paper, doing the same things they’ve always done over and over again. The perception is that creativity is the last thing a “bureaucrat” needs. I disagree. And I bet most COs reading this do as well. If you’re a Contracting Officer Podcast listener, or if you’ve read my other posts, you know I see creativity as a core skill in business – even in the business of government.
COs need to be creative to craft acquisition strategies that integrate their customers’ needs through the competitive process with what industry can actually do. I’m not talking about writing RFPs in iambic pentameter or making cool acronyms or logos for a programs. I’m talking about taking a clean-slate, creative approach to competing requirements, taking advantage of new ideas, meeting unique requirements, taking advantage (or creating) time-saving steps in the acquisition planning process, and taking the time to connect with both buyer and seller to create a solution that gets the best combination of product/service, schedule and price.
COs need to be creative in a variety of ways in an acquisition process, such as:
– whether (and how) to do sample task orders
– incentivizing contractor’s performance to meet the customer’s needs
– structuring Industry Day to have the best combination of information sharing relative to the specific acquisition, while ensuring maximum collaboration among interested parties
– designing a performance-based payment plan or other type of funding arrangement that meet mission requirements that enable small businesses to move faster than the speed of their internal funding
– collaborating with customers to navigate the narrow scope of the Weighted Guidelines tool in the DFARS (stay tuned for a CO Podcast on this one!)
– deciding how (and what type) of source selection evaluation to use given industry and commercial history
– and more.
Here’s the catch. The trend in federal procurement is to discourage this creativity. The trend seems to be to standardize the acquisition processes under the guise of “efficiency”. This trend undermines the very goal of having skilled people making informed decisions using critical thinking. By discouraging creativity in the process and review cycles, the less likely a CO is to going to be, or want to be, creative.
I was lucky to work in several offices that enabled (or at least didn’t discourage) creativity. Many of the current COs I meet are having their creativity stifled by this quest for homogenous and standardized contracting procedures. If we want better contracts, we need to enable contracting officers to use more creativity and latitude to think, innovate and learn (and make decisions).
Likewise, for you contracting officers who serve in an agency that gives you this latitude to be creative (there are many of these as well), embrace this flexibility to make government contracting better, one contract at a time.