If sequestration of federal funds kicks in, agencies will face making deep cuts to programs and that pain will flow down to contractors, experts say.
A sequestration causes automatic, indiscriminate, across-the-board budget cuts. The failure of the so-called supercommittee to find $1.2 trillion dollars in savings over a decade triggered the cuts. They’re set to take effect Jan. 2, 2013.
As a result, contractors too “are hostages in a showdown between the president and Congress over fundamental decisions on taxing and spending,” said John Cooney, former general counsel at the Office of Management and Budget and now a partner at the Venable law firm.
He spoke Jan. 17 at a panel discussion hosted by the Professional Services Council that looked at sequestration in detail. Cooney broke down the possible routes federal officials may take to deal with the cuts.
Cooney expects agencies to:
- Try to avoid terminating contracts. Instead, officials will reduce the amount of money obligated under their contracts.
- Become less willing to extend contracts into their option years.
- Obligate money for one fiscal year at a time on task order and services contracts.
- Possibly use the prospect of the sequester’s cuts to renegotiate contracts.
He also said agency officials will more often decide to not award new contracts.
“This will be a common agency practice in year one of a sequester. Procurements that can be put off will be put off,” he said during the discussion.
With available money, agency officials will maximize contracts that meet their agency’s core duties, said Alan Chvotkin, executive vice president and counsel for the Professional Services Council, who spoke on the panel as well.
Meanwhile he expects agencies to look for more flexibility to avoid hard-and-fast commitments, such as fixed-price contracts and minimum revenue guarantees. And on the other hand, officials may use more time-and-materials contracts, which are based on labor hours and materials.
However, Chvotkin said there are some policy constraints as the Obama administration has railed against this type of contract, which places a lot of risk on the government.
IDIQs and the General Services Administration’s Multiple Award Schedules program may become more attractive to agencies. They allow for more negotiations at the task order level, he said.
Cooney had several suggestions for companies in light of what may happen. Advocate for the importance of a program and stay in close contact with a contracting officer. Realize though that the officer may not know the fate of a program until very late in the process.
Businesses should also emphasize what they can do for the agency, including the options the company is willing to agree to that may even decrease its revenue, Chvotkin said.
He recommended checking the Past Performance Information Retrieval System (PPIRS) and the Federal Awardee Performance and Integrity Information System (FAPIIS). The information needs to be correct, and it should reflect as favorably as possible on the company’s performance.
Contractors can still challenge information tjat goes into the Federal Awardee Performance and Integrity System, but they have just a two-week window before the information becomes public.
The new provision takes affect Jan. 17, 2012. The start date was missing when the final rule was published Jan. 3.
Any information that agencies enter into database from Jan. 17 onward will be subject to a two-week delay before it is transferred to the publicly available part of FAPIIS. Past performance information won’t be published at all. Contractors will receive notice when new information about their company goes into FAPIIS, and they will have 7 days to point out information that should be exempt under the Freedom of Information Act.
In the new Federal Register notice, officials wrote that the delay until Jan. 17 will give agencies time to complete necessary system changes to support the two-week waiting period before contractors’ information goes live.
The current system is designed to automatically transfer information to the publicly available part of FAPIIS. Until officials make the change, companies would not have an opportunity to request withholding the information, the notice states.
FAPIIS is a one-stop website for contracting officers and federal employees to look at the history of companies’ work with the federal government. It includes data from the Performance Information Retrieval System, as well as information from other databases, including the Excluded Parties List System, which cites companies that are suspended or debarred from federal contracting.
The final rule gives companies seven days to find any information that should not be disclosed because it should be considered exempt. In such a case, officials will remove the information from FAPIIS to resolve the issue.
If the government official does not remove the item, it will be automatically released to the public website within 14 days after beginning entered into FAPIIS, according to the notice.
The Obama administration solidified an interim rule that requires agency officials to post a government contractor’s work history in a publicly accessible website.
The Federal Awardee Performance and Integrity Information System (FAPIIS) is a one-stop web site for contracting officers and federal employees to look at the history of companies’ work with the federal government.
FAPIIS includes data from the Performance Information Retrieval System, as well as information from other databases, including the Excluded Parties List System, which lists companies that are suspended or debarred from federal contracting. The overall purpose of FAPIIS is to make it easier for contracting officers to get an overall assessment of a company before awarding a contract by not having to search numerous databases.
A year ago, acquisition officials issued an interim rule making all the information public, except for past performance reviews by agencies.
The final rule took effect Jan. 3.
In the Federal Register notice about the rule, officials recognized the risks about the information going public though.
The final rule gives companies seven days to find any information that should not be disclosed because it should be considered exempt from disclosure. In such a case, officials will remove the information from FAPIIS to resolve the issue.
If the government official does not remove the item, it will be automatically released to the public site within two weeks after the review period began, according to the notice.
Procedures for disqualifying dishonest or incompetent federal contractors are too rarely exploited, according to a consensus of several senators, the White House and cross-agency watchdogs. But there is disagreement over whether the solution is improving application of the rules or whether Congress should make some suspensions and debarments mandatory.
At a Wednesday hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Chairman Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., expressed alarm that a series of reports from the Government Accountability Office and inspectors general have shown a reluctance of many agencies to refer unsatisfactory contractors to the Excluded Parties List System maintained by the General Services Administration.
A Pentagon report “just last month shows that over a 10-year period, DoD awarded $255 million to contractors who were convicted of criminal fraud; and almost $574 billion to contractors involved in civil fraud cases that resulted in a settlement or judgment against the contractor,” Lieberman said. “Last year, the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general found 23 cases where the department had canceled a contract because of poor performance, but in none of those cases did DHS suspend or debar the contractor.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, despite the existence of an anti-fraud task force following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, has not sent a single name to the list, Lieberman added, noting that the rarity of suspensions and debarments has been a concern of the committee as far back as 1981.
Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said she got angry about the issue when a U.S. soldier was killed in Iraq by a negligent truck driver working for a U.S. contractor. The U.S. military continued using the contractor. “It’s a matter of character for our nation,” said McCaskill, who is preparing related legislation to implement recommendations of the recently disbanded Commission on Wartime Contracting.
She regretted that proposals to require more suspensions and debarments founder because of a fear of litigation, because it’s “too much trouble,” some contractors are seen as “too big to fail,” or “it is unclear who is accountable for a failure” to pursue that course, she said. “We need to draw a line in the sand.”
Dan Gordon, the departing administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, said the Obama administration had made significant progress on the issue over the past three years, but the system’s “weak link” is ensuring that a fraudulent contractor is flagged for action in a timely way. “Sometimes the referral takes too long, as historically agencies have been very bad about sharing, either because officials didn’t check the list, checked it too late, or because of problems in the spelling of an entity’s name,” he said.
He pointed to a memo to agencies released Tuesday by Office of Management and Budget Director Jack Lew that requires agencies to appoint a senior accountable official to “assess the agency’s suspension and debarment program — including the adequacy of available training and resources — review internal policies and procedures,” ensure databases are checked before grants and contracts are awarded, and “take corrective action if an award is improperly made to a suspended or debarred contractor.”
Gordon said OMB has been working with its Interagency Suspension and Debarment Committee to improve training and create detailed agency guidance. But he expressed skepticism toward any prospective legislation making certain referrals mandatory, saying agency cultures differ and mandatory referrals that take away discretion could undermine the role of suspension and debarment officials.
Allison Lerner, the inspector general of the National Science Foundation who co-chairs an IG working group on the issue, said suspensions and debarments “could be used more frequently and effectively.” The resistance comes from misconceptions among agency contracting officials, she said. Some fear jeopardizing investigations by disclosing negative information on contractors and some hold the incorrect beliefs that a decision must be based only on facts uncovered in a judicial process and that IG investigations cannot be cited as evidence against contractors.
Panelists agreed that the model policy is that practiced by the Air Force. Steven Shaw, deputy general counsel for contractor responsibility at the Air Force described two recent suspensions, one involving the Boeing Co.’s launch systems units and the other involving programs within L-3 Communications. Sixty-two percent of his suspensions and debarments are “fact-based,” he said, meaning his team doesn’t wait for the Justice Department to bring criminal charges. “We take a broad view of the type of misconduct, not just criminal fraud but as it relates to business integrity, tax issues, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act or commercial fraud,” he said.
The Air Force also uses a “carrot-and-stick approach that is aggressive at the front end” but still allows contractors to prevent fraud through risk management and ethics programs.
Ranking committee member Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who as a staff director worked on the 1981 hearing chaired by then-Sen. William Cohen, R-Maine, reminded the hearing that the goal of suspension and debarment is “not to punish contractors but to protect” the taxpayer, and that allowing “bad actors” to win new contracts is “not fair or ethical to the honest contractors.” She said she is considering legislation that would force agencies — she mentioned the Justice Department — to step up use of the tool.
Such a move is opposed by Alan Chvotkin, executive vice president and counsel of the Professional Services Council, a contractors trade group. He praised this week’s OMB memo as good “cross-agency coordination to bring attention” to the appropriate use of suspension and debarment. But he stressed the “very limited circumstances” under which “automatic exclusion” should be applied to a contractor.
“The government has wide flexibility to assess each individual situation to determine whether the government is at risk, including built-in due process procedures,” he said. “Doing it in an arbitrary way would be a mistake and convert it into a punishment, which it is not.”
– by Charles S. Clark - Government Executive - November 16, 2011 at http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=49355&dcn=e_gvet
Senior defense official cautions against hinging contract awards on past-performance records.
A top defense acquisition policy official said the government should not overemphasize a company’s past work when awarding a contract because its limited database of information might become a barrier for some companies.
At a hearing March 28, Ashton Carter, undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, said the Defense Department does not have adequate data on past performance on which to base a contract award. He also questioned how DOD would handle cases in which companies want to break into the defense industry but have no work history with the federal government. Even if the company has done similar work for a foreign government, DOD would not have a record of it.
“I think it’s important that we not do anything that erects a barrier to entry for a contractor,” he told the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. (Watch the entire hearing.)
That would leave the principal burden on senior officials to get the defense acquisition workforce to collect more reliable information on companies’ work.
In its interim report, the commission recommends aligning past-performance assessments with contractors’ proposals for available awards.
The commission wants revisions to agency policies for contingency-related contracts “to limit contractors’ proposed federal past-performance references to only those contracts that have been recorded in the government’s past-performance database,” the report states.
At the same time, the commission said agency officials do not record detailed evaluations of contractors’ performance on a job because it’s not a priority for them, which could lead to giving contracts to habitual poor performers.
“Agencies’ failure to record contractor-performance assessments is costly,” the report states.
Carter’s comments echoed what other federal officials told the commission in February about the same past-performance recommendation. Maureen Shauket, chief acquisition officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development, said she was concerned about everyone getting a neutral rating on a past performance, “and that’s not in anyone’s interest.”
Dan Blalock, the Navy’s counsel, said defense officials need to make decisions based on each case’s circumstances.
Furthermore, Carter disagreed with the commission’s recommendation to increase the use of suspensions and debarments. The commission has proposed mandating automatic suspensions of indicted contractors and preventing contractors from avoiding suspensions and debarments through administrative maneuvers. Dan Gordon, administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy, also disagreed with that recommendation during the February hearing.
Carter said the government needs to root out fraud early in the process, and agencies must monitor contractors’ work closely.
“My gaze is principally on prevention and detection,” Carter said, and suspending or debarring a company is well beyond the point of acting on a problem.
“We need to get back to the front end of prevention and detection of fraud,” he added.
The commission plans to send its final report to Congress in July. It will include recommendations for improving contracting in war zones.
Here’s your chance, defense contractors, to give the department a piece of your mind.
Defense Department officials want industry input on rules that provide little value while driving up costs.
In a notice in the 2/17/2011 Federal Register, DOD officials said they understand that the various reporting requirements and other acquisition practices make industry adopt processes and make investments that increase costs, especially overhead costs. At the same time, some of those requirements add little value to the overall work.
So, DOD wants to know the policies that industry believes fit that description. It will take submissions through March 31.
The request for industry’s comments is the next stage of DOD’s Better Buying Power Initiative, launched in 2010 by Ashton Carter, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics.
Industry sent defense officials more than 500 suggestions last summer, and Carter incorporated these comments into a Sept. 10 memo. The memo sets out 23 ways the government can improve its performance and incentivize better performance from industry. It is aimed at lowering prices without sacrificing quality.
“It is guidance from me to the acquisition workforce in the Defense Department on how we can get more without more,” Carter said in a Feb. 9 speech at the Cowen Investment Conference in New York, N.Y.
Under the new request for comments, DOD will use the suggestions as part of internal deliberations on the buying initiative, officials said. When contractors submit a suggestion on a costly policy, officials want to know the magnitude of the cost and have the recommendations identify the sources of the costs, backed by credible and convincing data.
“DOD’s goal is to develop a fact-based program to reform cost-inflating practices,” the Federal Register notice states.
With detailed suggestions, officials can evaluate and prioritize them. More specifically, they want to follow up on industry’s recommendations from 2010 on the thresholds related to the provisions in the Truth in Negotiations Act. In particular, they want to review audit practices and certain barriers to correctly balancing industry’s abilities as DOD’s buying shifts and moves based on demands, the notice states.
About the Author: Matthew Weigelt is acquisition editor for Federal Computer Week, published Feb. 17, 2011.
In an about-face, the Army has suspended all of its ongoing insourcing activities, potentially savings thousands of private sector positions.
In a Feb. 1 memorandum, Army Secretary John McHugh announced he was halting the service’s insourcing initiative immediately in favor of a scaled-back approach in which his office would have to directly approve projects.
“In an era of significantly constrained resources, the Army must approach the insourcing of functions currently performed by contract in a well-reasoned, analytically based and systemic manner, consistent with law and prevailing presidential and Department of Defense guidance,” McHugh wrote in the memo, released on Thursday by the Professional Services Council, an industry group that has opposed plans to bring contractor jobs back in-house.
The memo suspends all ongoing insourcing transitions, but does not reverse efforts that already have been completed.
Army spokeswoman Anne Edgecomb said the memo is not intended to stop insourcing altogether but to ensure that the process is conducted responsibly and deliberately. “We are trying to make sure we do everything we can to be fiscally responsible,” Edgecomb said. “We see the writing on the wall.”
Edgecomb did not have figures immediately available on the number of contractor positions the policy change would effect.
The Defense Department’s insourcing program leader said on Thursday that the Pentagon did not direct Army to change its policy.
“The department is committed to meeting its statutory obligations under Title 10 to annually review its contracted services, identifying those that are inappropriately being performed by the private sector and should be insourced to government performance,” said Thomas Hessel, a senior manpower analyst in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, in a statement to Government Executive. “This includes services that are inherently governmental or closely associated with inherently governmental in nature; provide unauthorized personal services; or may otherwise be exempted from private sector performance … While some contracted services may be identified for insourcing, some services determined to be no longer required or of low priority may be eliminated or reduced in scope while others will continue to be provided by the private sector.”
All future insourcing proposals, McHugh wrote, must include “at minimum, a manpower requirements determination, an analysis of all potential alternatives to the establishment of permanent civilian authorizations to perform the contracted work, certification of fund availability and a comprehensive legal review.”
Thomas Lamont, assistant secretary of the Army for manpower and reserve affairs, along with Mary Sally Matiella, assistant secretary of the Army for financial management and comptroller, will be responsible for developing criteria to evaluate the efficiencies generated from the policy change, McHugh said.
Contractor groups, which have long criticized the Defense Department’s insourcing plans as driven by quotas and lacking any verifiable cost savings, applauded the development.
“Secretary McHugh is taking the right approach to insourcing,” PSC President Stan Soloway said. “We have said all along that all sourcing decisions for clearly commercial work — whether insourcing or outsourcing — must be done strategically with the best interests of the government mission and American taxpayer in mind.”
John Palatiello, president of the Business Coalition for Fair Competition, a group formed to challenge the Obama administration’s insourcing plans, said the memo is proof the initiative has been poorly executed.
“BCFC renews its call for a governmentwide moratorium on insourcing until common-sense standards and metrics for assuring that any insourcing is in the taxpayers’ interests, does not increase unemployment, and is focused on statutorily defined inherently governmental activities, not commercial activities,” Palatiello said.
The memo comes only a few weeks after the Government Accountability Office reported the Army had identified more than 4,200 full-time jobs in which contractors are performing either inherently governmental or unauthorized personal services. In both the inherently governmental and the unauthorized personal services contracts, the Army typically would be required to bring those functions back in-house.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced in August 2010 that the Pentagon was implementing a fiscal 2011 billet freeze and halting its insourcing plans because of a lack of cost savings. But, the plan affected only civilian agencies and offices. The military services were exempt from the freeze, allowing them to continue with their insourcing plans.
Soloway called on the other military services to follow the Army’s approach. “Through such a process the Army, DoD and the taxpayer will gain vital insight into the total life-cycle costs associated with these decisions, the degree to which they address the Army’s workforce needs, and more,” he said. “We hope, as they say, the Army leads the way.”
– by Robert Brodsky - GovExec.com - February 3, 2011
The FY2011 defense act puts a contractor’s reckless behavior to the Web.
On the heels of an interim rule to withhold award fees for putting a government employee’s health or safety in danger, a new law will put that information in a database of contractor work history.
In November, the Defense Department amended its own acquisition regulations to require contracting officers to consider reducing or even denying a company’s award fee if it jeopardizes a federal employee. A company also possibly can lose award money for a subcontractor’s negligent behavior.
The interim rule was required by the fiscal 2010 National Defense Authorization Act, which became law Oct. 28, 2009.
Now though, the fiscal 2011 defense authorization act, which became law Jan. 7, takes the reckless behavior to the Web.
If DOD officials conclude a contractor put a federal worker’s life in harm’s way, the information can be added to the Federal Awardee Performance and Integrity Information System, or FAPIIS.
It’s a database of specific information about a contractors’ past work with the government. Contracting officers are required to look at the work history in FAPIIS and to factor it into an award decision. The new law calls for officials to add a final determination of contractor fault to the database.
Meanwhile, as more information detailing companies’ past performances is added to the database, FAPIIS may be the frontier of new bid protests, one procurement lawyer said.
Companies might object to an agency’s inappropriate consideration of a past performance when selecting an awardee, Puja Satiani, an associate at Crowell and Moring law firm, said this week in a webinar on contracting trends in 2011.
Companies might also say there was no meaningful consideration or disclosure of a company’s past performance history before a contract was awarded.
Other government contracting attorneys say 2011 is going to be a tough year for contractors as oversight gets tougher.
“There will be no rest of the weary,” said Dan Forman, a partner at the law firm.
– by Matthew Weigelt, acquisition editor for Federal Computer Week- Jan. 14, 2011
As old years end and new ones begin, I can’t resist the temptation to talk about who had a good year and who had a bad year.
Admittedly my criteria are arbitrary so don’t hesitate to disagree. There are plenty of worthy candidates for best and worst year. Here are my picks. Please share yours.
Who had a bad year?
Small Businesses
As insourcing continued as a management strategy by many government agencies, small businesses felt the biggest impact. While companies across the size spectrum saw contracts go away or workers get recruited into government jobs, small businesses have the smallest cushion to absorb the hits.
Compounding the issue is that small businesses often are doing to jobs most likely to get insourced.
Small businesses also faced challenges in the market as agencies continue to bundle smaller contracts into larger ones that are difficult for small business to qualify for as prime contractors.
Who had a worse year?
Unisys Corp.
Their battle to hold onto their Transportation Security Administration infrastructure contract lasted nearly a year before they exhausted all their protests and appeals.
Unisys fought hard to keep the work, which had been worth more than $2 billion since the contract started in 2002. The recompete, worth about $500 million, went to Computer Sciences Corp.
The fight for Unisys to keep the contract went through multiple rounds, with Unisys winning most of those rounds. TSA was forced to reevaluate bids, but still picked CSC. The Government Accountability Office ultimately sided with TSA, and CSC was allowed to begin work on the contract in August.
Who had the worst year?
GTSI Corp.
I don’t think I’ll get many arguments about this choice.
A Small Business Administration suspension nearly sunk GTSI and the company is still reeling.
Accused of using small businesses as front companies to funnel money and work to itself, GTSI had to jettison its chief executive officer and general counsel just to get the suspension lifted. The company’s stock sank and its reputation is severely damaged.
The new CEO Sterling Phillips has vowed to accelerate the GTSI’s strategy of becoming a services company. But he’s the fourth CEO with that goal without even considering the impact of the now-lifted suspension.
Phillips acknowledged the hit the company’s morale has taken and is frank about the challenges ahead. He’s also confident that GTSI will come out of this intact and independent.
Who had a good year?
Agilex Technologies
The company suffered a tragic blow at the start of 2010 when its co-founder Robert LaRose died unexpectedly.
He was mourned by a who’s who of industry leaders who got their start in government IT under his tutelage.
But his legacy of setting high expectations lives on at Agilex, which experience explosive growth – beyond the 2010 goals LaRose set for the company before his death.
Revenue grew 70 percent. The company added 100 employees to its headcount and it launched a fourth line of business to pursue Homeland Security and Justice department customers.
The company is also one of the first Apple authorized systems integrators in the government market.
While LaRose’s loss surely weighs heavily at the company, the foundation he left behind continues to thrive.
Who had a better year?
TASC Inc.
Northrop Grumman sold the company to get out from under organizational conflicts of interest concerns. For TASC, the independence must have come as a breath of fresh air.
With its growth no longer limited by other work that Northrop had, TASC won new business with the Defense Department and other customers that need its technical analysis services.
Its biggest win was the FAA SE2020 contract worth $827 million to support the transition to NextGen air traffic control system.
It’ll be fun watching them in 2011 and beyond.
Who had the best year?
CGI Federal
I admit this reflects my personal bias because I love merger and acquisition news, but CGI Federal stepped up in a big way when it acquired Stanley for $1 billion.
Unlike most other major acquisitions, the two companies didn’t have much overlap so you didn’t have a lot of talk about “synergies,” that polite term for cuts. Instead, Stanley brought a whole new set of customers in the defense and intelligence world.
For Phil Nolan, Stanley’s CEO and the other senior executives, there had to be an immense feeling of satisfaction of having grown the company from a few dozen employees to hundreds. It was quite a ride.
Hopefully, we’ll see Nolan and others like George Wilson, Stanley’s executive vice president, reappear in the market sometime in the future.
– by Nick Wakeman – Dec. 22, 2010 – Federal Computer Week
Here’s what to avoid if you want to succeed in the government market.
The acquisition storm is coming, and it’s bringing with it an onslaught of new competitors fleeing the sagging private-sector economy, shrunken federal budgets, mounting award protests and new technologies demanding new investment. You could go emulate an ostrich — no one would blame you for the impulse — or you could read what four of the top IT consultants in Washington tell their clients.
Washington Technology talked with Ray Bjorklund: senior vice president and chief knowledge officer, FedSources Inc.; Philip Kiviat: partner, Guerra Kiviat Inc.; Kevin Plexico: senior vice president of research and analysis services, Input Inc.; and Warren Suss: president, Suss Consulting Inc., and asked each one this question:
How would a company in the federal market best keep its existing customers and add new ones in the coming year?
Some of their answers surprised us, but before we get into that, let’s back up a tick. Although the members of our ad hoc panel offered different strategies for achieving success, they spoke with one voice when describing the fastest route to disaster: Failure to take care of your customer.
You think that’s obvious? So did we, but listen to this: “I have so many clients — companies large, midsize and small — whose senior management (and some midlevel management) never talks with the customers — I see it all the time,” Kiviat said.
It doesn’t take long before those customers think their business is being taken for granted and start considering their options.
“You have to keep them happy,” Kiviat said, “and the only way you can do that is by knowing what they need and what they want, by continually asking: ‘How are we doing?’ ”
Don’t confuse the IT business with information technology itself. Technology is not the issue, Kiviat said. “We have so much technology today that, unless you’re on the bleeding edge, you can do many [kinds of IT implementations] quickly and in different ways, depending on the customer. The question they don’t necessarily ask but that you have to answer is: “What do they really want to do?”
If you’re not tending your customer, others stand ready and willing to take on the job. Even the most well-placed incumbents have their vulnerabilities.
For example, Bjorklund said, “I heard about this incumbent that was delivering a high level of service. The agency loved the incumbent contractor; they had a great working relationship. Then it came time to recompete the contract. The agency said: ‘We like you guys a lot, but your competitor came in with a bid that was 25 percent better than yours.’ And they were out.”
Your reaction to technology changes can make you appear either eager and able to take on new business or inflexible and mired in the past. Take, for example, the shift to cloud-based services, which typically requires an investment in infrastructure and technology networks in anticipation of returns.
“Federal contractors are not used to investing upfront,” Suss said. “They’re used to investing in the proposal-and-capture process but generally are reluctant, before an award has been made, to make these kinds of sometimes significant infrastructure investments and establish supplemental capabilities before they know it’s going to generate revenue.”
Not only is that a great way to sour a relationship, he said, but also “inattention to such changes in the competitive landscape may create openings for newcomers.”
And believe it — word of any real or perceived failure to perform well on contracts you have now will travel fast.
“If your past performance is not strong, you become a nonstarter, not only from the agencies’ point of view but also in the view of prime contractors,” Plexico said. “You’ll be digging a big hole for yourself.”
But getting your own house is in order is only the beginning of your to-do list to achieve success, because, Bjorklund said, “no single initiative or strategy will ensure a win. You must pay attention to all the subtleties.”
– Sami Lais is a special contributor to Washington Technology – 12/7/2010.