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TSA wants industry input on its proposed agile contract vehicle

November 12, 2018 By Andrew Smith

The Transportation Security Administration is asking industry to weigh in on its strategy for building a bullpen of tech companies the agency could call on to stand up new software applications.

The agency last week issued a special notice detailing its Fast Agile Scalable Teams procurement program, a proposed contract vehicle TSA plans to use to acquire custom software and modernize legacy systems.

Vendors selected under the blanket purchase agreement would be required to apply agile methodology—breaking large projects into smaller chunks, developed in sprints—to build and maintain a suite of enterprisewide software applications.

“In order to successfully execute [its] mission, TSA must have the capability to customize mission support systems [and] develop custom software solutions when no solution is commercially available or from government sources,” the agency wrote in a performance work statement.

Keep reading this article at: https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2018/11/tsa-wants-industry-input-its-proposed-agile-contract-vehicle/152590/

Filed Under: Contracting News Tagged With: agile, agile services, applications, contracting vehicle, software, TSA, US DOT

TSA buyers reach out to minority small business contractors

August 26, 2016 By Andrew Smith

TSA-LogoProgram managers at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) tend to look to large companies when shopping for goods and services, Latetia Henderson, assistant administrator of TSA’s Office of Acquisition, told an industry day gathering on Tuesday.  “We struggle to get them to understand small businesses.”

Mingling with 26 small business contracting firms attending the Contract Connections town hall at TSA headquarters in Arlington, VA, Henderson and top Homeland Security procurement officials stressed their commitment to buying products from small businesses for “the crux of what TSA does” in the field, such as explosive trace detection, intermodal training and call centers.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.govexec.com/contracting/2016/08/tsa-buyers-reach-out-minority-small-business-contractors/130989

Filed Under: Contracting News Tagged With: minority owned business, SBA, small business, TSA

DoD, TSA and HHS officials provide contracting advice to small businesses

August 23, 2013 By ei2admin

The Pentagon’s point woman for hiring women-owned small businesses said this week that she “needed a lift” from the travails of furloughs and sequestration.

“This is a tough time for the federal government and DoD in particular if your’re concerned about small businesses,” said Linda Oliver, deputy director of the Defense Department’s Office of Small Business Programs. “Our travel dollars have been cut to nonexistent, our training dollars cut. I’m not second- guessing the decisions, but it’s kind of a down time.”

Speaking on Tuesday to hundreds of current and prospective contractors at the American Express Open’s annual summit, Oliver’s chief advice was to take advantage of the “debrief,” the optional meeting companies may request within three days of learning that they have been eliminated during a contract award process. “The debrief is not on the contracting officers’ list of fun things to do, since they fear they’re being set up for a bid protest,” she said. “But it’s really valuable and gives all involved perspective and closure,” she said.

Keep reading this article at: http://www.govexec.com/contracting/2013/08/despite-sequester-agencies-continue-hiring-women-owned-contractors/69104

 

Filed Under: Contracting Tips Tagged With: bid protest, budget cuts, debriefing, DoD, FAR, furloughs, HHS, sequestration, TSA, woman owned business, wosb

Best and worst performances in government contracting in 2010

January 3, 2011 By ei2admin

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

Filed Under: Contracting News Tagged With: contractor performance, DoD, FAA, federal contracting, GAO, insourcing, SBA, small business, TSA

A drumbeat of warnings about impropriety regarding Alaska native corporation contracts

October 6, 2010 By ei2admin

Government officials and the media have produced a drumbeat of reports about possible abuses of the large-scale contracts given to Alaska native corporations without competition.

August 2004: A Los Angeles Times story questioned the Army’s award without competition of contracts worth nearly $1 billion for base security guards to two Alaska native subsidiaries, Alutiiq Security and Technology and Chenega Integrated Systems.

November 2004: A senior aide to Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), the chief counsel to Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and others press to have the Transportation Security Administration award a $500 million technology maintenance contract for screening equipment directly to Chenega Technology Services Corp. The TSA rescinds the deal after a story about it appears in The Washington Post.

April 2006: A Government Accountability Office review concludes that spending on ANCs had soared because federal officials found them “a quick, easy and legal method of awarding contracts for any value.” But the review found that government officials did not know the rules for overseeing the firms and cited “an increased risk that an inappropriate degree of the work is being done by large businesses rather than by the ANC firms.”

April 2006: In another report, the GAO also found that the Army paid 25 percent more than necessary on many of the base security guard contracts with Alutiiq and Chenega, even though they knew they could get the lower price through competition. Close to half of the work was passed on to two established security giants, Wackenhut Services and Vance International. Auditors also found that the Army failed to check whether the subsidiaries were doing the required 51 percent of the work.

May 2006: After Hurricane Katrina, the Army Corps of Engineers awarded a $39.5 million contract for temporary classrooms in Mississippi to an Alaska native corporation subsidiary called Akima Site Operations, even though the Corps “had information that the cost for the classrooms was significantly less than what Akima was charging,” according to a GAO report.

June 2006: At a hearing, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) said ANCs were used to circumvent open competition at great expense to taxpayers: The “Administration has used ANC contracts to manage commercial property in Virginia, renovate buildings in Brazil, and train security guards in Iraq. And much of the work has been done by non-Native companies working as subcontractors.” He added: “Good intentions have been replaced by avarice and indifference to the interests of the taxpayer.”

January 2007: An audit by the Defense Department’s inspector general’s office concludes that a new intelligence agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity agreed to pay up to $27 million more over 10 years than it would have through proper competition on a $100 million lease-and-construction deal let in 2003. The $100 million contract was awarded without competition to an Alaska native corporation subsidiary called TKC Communications. The audit concluded that the Defense intelligence operation “circumvented numerous laws” in making the expedited arrangements for the lease.

June 2007: The Department of Homeland Security issues an “acquisition alert” about the use of Alaska native corporations, warning contracting officials to be sure that they were getting a fair price and that the native corporations were doing their appropriate share of the work.

October 2007: The Department of Homeland Security inspector general issues a report criticizing a $475 million contract awarded without competition by the then-U.S. Customs Service in February 2003 to the Chenega Technology Services Corp. The work is to maintain thousands of gamma-ray, X-ray and other scanning machines at the nation’s ports and borders. The DHS inspector general says the contract should not have been awarded because the corporation was too large to qualify, a circumstance that prevented qualified small businesses from competing for the work. Some evidence collected by the inspector general suggested Chenega “subcontracted more than the 50 percent allowed by federal regulations and the contract.” But auditors said there was not enough information to come to a definitive conclusion.

April 2008: The Air Force’s Air Combat Command warns all contracting officials about the use of contracts awarded without competition to ANCs and others. Contracting officers had to require written justification for using ANCs and specify the amount of work they were expected to do. “Effective immediately ALL sole source actions over $550K must be approved,” the Air Force memo said.

May 2008: The Defense Department inspector general’s office reported that senior Air Force officers at the Air Combat Command used an Alaska native subsidiary, Chugach McKinley, to direct a $128,000 contract awarded without competition to a favored vendor.

August 2008: Auditors in the Small Business Administration’s inspector general’s office find that two Alaska native corporation subsidiaries had allowed nonnative executives to receive millions in work and fees in violation of SBA rules. APM, a subsidiary of Cape Fox Corp., and Goldbelt Raven, a subsidiary of Goldbelt Corp., received contracts worth more than $833 million between 2003 and 2006. Executives in each agreed to pay more than $23 million over three years to nonnative executives at other companies, with whom they had personal ties, the auditors said.

October 2008: A Washington Post story reveals that officials at the FDA used a subsidiary of the Calista Corp. to direct work to a Washington public relations powerhouse called Qorvis Communications. An FDA official with ties to Qorvis later says that she and others skirted the rules simply as a “a matter of efficiency.” FDA officials immediately suspended the contract and ordered an independent investigation.

July 2009: A study by the Senate subcommittee on contracting oversight finds that few ANC employees are Alaska natives but that the companies have joined the ranks of the government’s largest contractors. The subcommittee’s investigation shows that ANCs have taken advantage of their contracting preferences, “receiving large no-bid contracts and passing through much of the work to other contractors.” The report, prepared for Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), said: “The analysis finds that Alaska Native Corporations are multi-million or billion dollar corporations that are now among the largest federal contractors. Although ANCs provide some benefits to their shareholders, those benefits may not be in proportion to the potential for waste, fraud and abuse created by the ANCs’ contracting preferences.”

— By Robert O’Harrow Jr. – Washington Post – September 29, 2010

Filed Under: Contracting News Tagged With: Air Force, Alaskan Native, Army, Army Corps of Engineers, competition, DoD, FDA, federal contracting, GAO, Homeland Security, Native American, SBA, set-aside, TSA

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