Georgia Tech Procurement Assistance Center

Why contractor past performance data is becoming both more, less valuable

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When the General Services Administration released the $65 billion Alliant 2 governmentwide acquisition contract for IT services back in June 2016, it was one of the first major procurement efforts to put a premium on past performance.

As part of the self-scoring approach to Alliant 2, GSA determined that 40 percent of the evaluation points would be on how vendors have performed on previous and similar work with the government.  At the time, industry analysts praised GSA for building on this self-scoring approach.  Now three years later, the self-scoring approach where past performance is a significant evaluation factor has grown in popularity.

At the same time, vendors and federal procurement officials alike heed a common call that the current approach to obtaining past performance is problematic and needs to be rethought.

“As the government moves to buying more services and solutions, things are getting more subjective and you want to be able to do a better job of motivating contractors to do more,” said Jim Williams, a former federal executive with GSA, the IRS and the Homeland Security Department, and now a principal with Williams Consulting, LLC and an advisor for GovConRx.  “The forces are coming together to say vendor past performance is a valuable tool.  But it’s not working as it should because it’s too burdensome and not as accurate as it should be.  No one wants to throw it out.  We just want to fix it.”

Experts say the current system, the Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System (CPARS), takes too much time to fill out, lacks important details and isn’t as accurate as it needs to be.

“The time and effort to draft CPARS evaluations is too much, and with most agency contracting staffs pressed to do more with less, that gets pushed out further, especially if there is a need to justify ratings over satisfactory,” said Mike Smith, a former DHS director of strategic sourcing and now executive vice president at GovConRx.  “There needs to be some way to justify anything over satisfactory that is not so hard to track down all the information so it becomes less cumbersome.  Contractors also are not actively engaged in the documentation and support of the ratings.  That has to change too, especially as agencies are paying a lot more attention to ratings.  We have to figure out how to make sure past performance ratings are not done in haste.”

Smith said on average, depending on the type of procurement, it could take a contracting officer a few minutes to a few hours to write an in-depth CPARS review.

New data compiled by GovConRx shows the value of CPARS is dropping dramatically.

Continue reading at:  Federal News Network

Save the date: GSA to host FAST conference April 14-16, 2020 in Atlanta

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During the Coalition’s Spring Training Conference last week, Emily Murphy, the administrator of the General Services Administration, announced that the agency will be hosting a Federal Acquisition Service Training (FAST) Conference on April 14-16, 2020, in Atlanta.

As many of you know, the Coalition has been a strong advocate for GSA-hosted training opportunities, which will help facilitate the critically important task of educating government and industry on GSA’s contracting programs, e-tools, and other initiatives in an environment that fosters constructive dialogue for common sense solutions.

The return of a nation-wide training conference is a game-changer for GSA and the procurement community.  The FAST Conference will provide agencies, as well as industry, with thousands of procurement training hours and the opportunity to explore the latest commercial solutions that meet Federal agencies’ mission critical needs.  In addition, the Conference will provide GSA, customer agencies, and industry with a unique and valuable business intelligence opportunity, as stakeholders share information on key program initiatives, acquisition policies, commercial capabilities, and trends in the commercial marketplace.

You can find more information on the conference here.

Continue reading at:  Federal News Network

HUD is hunting for vendors for next phase of ‘centers of excellence’

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The Housing and Urban Development Department is bringing on vendors to help the agency overhaul its customer service operations, drive cloud adoption and expand its use of data analytics.

HUD and the General Services Administration on May 17th released draft solicitations for the second phase of the department’s Centers of Excellence program.  The high-profile initiative offers agencies the opportunity to improve existing IT systems and lay the groundwork for new technologies with extra assistance from GSA and the White House.

HUD was the second agency selected to participate in the program, after the Agriculture Department.  On Friday, GSA kicked off the third iteration of the program at the Office of Management and Budget.

In phase one of the HUD program, which began in September, government officials worked with industry to determine how to best address issues in key facets of the department’s IT infrastructure.  In phase two, the agency will recruit vendors to implement those solutions.

“We are excited to begin this next phase of our modernization efforts,” HUD Chief Operating Officer Ralph Gaines said in a statement. “We’re looking forward to seeing how these efforts will further transform the agency and make it more accountable to our customers.”

Continue reading at:  Nextgov

OPM chief to propose legislation for merger with GSA

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Nearly a year after the Trump administration announced its proposal to send the bulk of the Office of Personnel Management’s functions to the General Services Administration, acting OPM Director Margaret Weichert said Tuesday that she will be submitting proposed legislation to Congress authorizing the merger “hopefully by Friday.”

Speaking with reporters, Weichert said that the legislation would transfer the legal authorities currently provided to OPM to an as-yet unnamed office within GSA, akin to its existing Federal Acquisition and Public Buildings services.  Additionally, the bill would create a small policy-focused personnel office within the Executive Office of the President, modeled after the Office of Federal Procurement Policy.

Continue reading at:  Government Executive

GSA unveils key tenets of governmentwide e-commerce pilot

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The General Services Administration is kicking off the final phase of a multi-year effort to stand up a governmentwide e-commerce platform that would make it easier for agencies to buy commercial products.

GSA on Thursday, May 2nd released the implementation plan for part two of its commercial platforms initiative, laying out the blueprint for the initial version of the portal.  In the months ahead, GSA and the Office of Management and Budget will start hunting for multiple vendors to build a proof of concept of the platform, which is scheduled to launch in late 2019.

The system would allow agencies to quickly purchase a wide variety of commercial products without going through the lengthy government procurement process.  By offering items like office supplies, tools and hardware, the portal would make it easier for industry to do business with government and lower the price of basic goods for federal agencies, according to GSA officials.

Continue reading at Nextgov:  https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2019/05/gsa-unveils-key-tenants-governmentwide-e-commerce-pilot/156714/

How DUNS number changes could affect your business

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Businesses of all sizes should know of a significant change in the way government grants and contracts will be handled.  The General Services Administration (“GSA”) announced in an interview with Nextgov.com that they are changing vendors for their federal contractor numbering system – better known as the DUNS (“Data Universal Numbering System”).  The system update won’t likely look different for companies right away, but here’s what you should know moving forward.

What is the DUNS?

The Data Universal Numbering System is a long-held practice for assigning businesses or organizations a unique identifier that can be used when applying for grants or contract opportunities through the government.  The GSA runs contracting programs is the agency responsible for making sure businesses follow correct procedures when looking to be awarded government business – including ensuring their application includes a valid DUNS.

Since 1962, Dun & Bradstreet has managed much of the system, including the DUNS program – an addition to the system brought about by regulation in 1998.  For twenty years, D&B has held the contract for managing validation and records.  That all changed last year when the GSA announced they were opening up the role to competing bids.

Continue reading the article at: Nav Blog

GSA moves forward with plan to consolidate the federal supply schedule program

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The General Services Administration (“GSA”) currently operates 24 Multiple Award Schedules (“MAS”), under which it awards largely pre-negotiated contracts on largely commercial-item terms for a dizzying array of products and services.  The current schedules are organized by industry or type of service, with individual schedules covering areas both broad (Schedule 70, IT procurement), narrow (Schedule 78, sports equipment, signs and trophies), and potentially duplicative (Schedule 71, furniture/Schedule 72, furnishings and floor coverings).  The GSA recently announced that it will abolish this fractured landscape.  Rather than maintain its current 24 MAS rubrics as separate entities, GSA announced it will consolidate all 24 into a single schedule.  Stephanie Shutt, the Director of GSA’s MAS Program Management Office, described this change as part of a “mass reform project” to “ensure MAS is easy, efficient, and modern.”  This announcement impacts all contractors with this type of schedule contract and will dramatically alter the process by which contractors apply for and government stakeholders purchase from GSA schedules.

Continue reading this article at: Arnold & Porter website

U.S. Government issues definition of “recruitment fees” in FAR anti-trafficking regulations

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The Department of Defense (“DoD”), General Services Administration (“GSA”), and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (“NASA”) recently issued a final rule amending the Federal Acquisition Regulation (“FAR”) to clarify the FAR’s prohibition on assessing employees with recruitment fees in connection with federal contracts.  The rule provides a final definition of “recruitment fees” and clarifies the FAR’s broad prohibition on federal contractors or subcontractors assessing employees or potential employees with any such fees.  The final rule brings long-awaited clarity to the scope of the prohibition on recruitment fees, as the term has not previously been defined in anti-trafficking regulations.

Keep reading this article at: Arnold & Porter website

Defense dominates experiment in streamlined bidding for innovation

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Streamlined solicitations for innovative commercial products and services, known as commercial solutions openings are beginning to take off in the Defense Department. Even the General Services Administration’s CSO service, which is open to all agencies for a fee, so far has been dominated by Defense users.

CSOs aren’t as well known or broadly used as their procurement-innovation cousin, other transaction authority, which gives agencies the ability to strike contracts outside the Federal Acquisition Regulation for research, prototypes and production to obtain technology from nontraditional defense contractors. Eleven agencies including Defense have OT authority.

GSA’s CSO holds the potential to bring civilian agencies, most of which don’t have OT authority, the ability to reach out to and select suppliers unencumbered by the Federal Acquisition Regulation. So far, civilian agencies haven’t been biting, but Pentagon organizations are, even though they have their own CSO provider.

The very first GSA CSO customer was none other than the Defense Innovation Unit, a once-experimental buying organization that invented CSOs. Originally designed to lure emerging companies to work for the Pentagon by easing the pain of federal procurement processes, the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental, or DIUx, lost the X last summer, when it was designated a permanent outpost for testing defense buying boundaries.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.govexec.com/excellence/management-matters/2019/03/defense-dominates-experiment-streamlined-bidding-innovation/155373/

White House issues new guidance on category management

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Eight years after the Obama administration began importing the private-sector procurement tool known as “category management,” the Trump administration on Thursday rescinded old directives and delivered new agency guidance.

In a March 21 memo to all agency heads, Office of Management and Budget Deputy Director Margaret Weichert—who is doing double duty running the Office of Personnel Management — tasked agencies with a new reporting regime for shared services that “supersedes and rescinds” OMB directives from 2011 and 2012.

Category management involves agency teams coordinating bulk purchasing in areas such as information technology, security and protection, and transportation. Weichert’s memo reported that as much as 56 percent of the government’s $325 billion in purchases of software, mobile services, technology services and travel remained “unaligned” or decentralized, as of December 2018.

“This statistic confirms that substantial cost-avoidances and performance benefits are going unrealized and underscores the need for greater management attention on collaborative buying at both the federal and agency levels by increasing the portion of an agency’s spend” using category management, the memo said.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/cio-briefing/2019/03/white-house-issues-new-guidance-category-management/155759/

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