GovernmentExecutive.com

Veterans of competitive sourcing at the Forest Service and Energy Department on Monday shared lessons gleaned from three years of operation under revised rules for public-private job competitions, stressing the need for communication and a readiness to live with contest results.

Jacqueline Myers, associate deputy chief of business operations with the Forest Service, emphasized the importance of communicating throughout the sometimes lengthy process of conducting a competition, bringing "daylight" to as much as possible, given constraints imposed by procurement rules. "Be sensitive to the effects of competitive sourcing on agency personnel," she said, advising that leaders allow employees to provide input.

"I do believe that if you take the time to really invest, and sometimes do what feels like going painfully slowly at the beginning, with all of what you have to do internally and externally, and really articulate to folks that you're not dragging your feet, you're trying to go slow so you can go fast later, it helps you," Myers said during a session at the Excellence in Government conference in Washington, which is sponsored in part by Government Executive.

She discussed her "previous life" serving on the line as a deputy regional forester with the agency, interweaving the perspective of local employees as she related lessons learned implementing the Office of Management and Budget's Circular A-76, the rulebook for public-private competitions that was revised in 2003.

Myers also stressed the importance of standardizing Federal Activities Inventory Reform Act listings of jobs and their classifications as commercial or inherently governmental, and described how the Forest Service maintains a computerized listing of positions' FAIR Act status, classifying new positions as they are created. The system allows production of the agency's inventory data as a standard report, Myers said. She said the computerized system is much easier to work with than the previous laborious process of compiling data by hand.

The Forest Service has had a rocky recent history with A-76 competitions. Two years ago, Myers' predecessor indicated the agency would slow down its pace of competitions after attracting congressional criticism for running numerous small competitions that failed to meet the objective of increasing efficiency. OMB officials at that time suggested other agencies might learn from the Forest Service's mistakes.

Myers indicated that after examining more than 3,500 positions for competitive sourcing in fiscal 2003 and 2004, the agency looked at just 750 positions in fiscal 2005.

The Forest Service also worked on two business process reorganizations, which aim to reassess how the agency performs a certain function in much the way an in-house bidding team does during a public-private competition, though without the competition. Almost 2,000 positions were considered under these processes, she said, which together are projected to save $60 million annually.

Dennis O'Brien, director of the Energy Department's office of competitive sourcing, shared insights from his experience with the post-competition phase of competitive sourcing. He stressed the importance of using a "residual organization," optional under the circular, to oversee the service provider selected and perform any related work that was not competed.

If an in-house team wins, O'Brien said, it must be ready to adhere to the terms of the letter of obligation, which is an enforceable contract document. He described incidents in which in-house teams had requested personnel upgrades from their bid proposal, and said one such case was resolved by allowing the team the higher salaried staffer only if it reshuffled other personnel funding to find the money.

For its part, the agency should treat the letter of obligation similarly to a private contract when it comes to multiple-year funding, finding a way to protect future funds to pay the in-house team, he said.

O'Brien said the scenario in which an agency seeks to terminate an in-house team for poor performance under the letter of obligation is still untested. Hopefully, Energy will not be the first agency to try that route, he said.

COMMENTS

• I was rather surprised at the vacuous remarks presented by Energy Department "competitive sourcing veteran" Dennis O'Brien. A much more interesting story would have been the debacle he and DOE created in outsourcing its Logistics Functions. DOE originally awarded the contract for the logistics work to a private company -- Logistics Applications Inc., despite that company bidding $2.6 million more than the federal employees already doing the jobs. When a DOE senior procurement officer upheld the employee's initial protest of that award, marking the first such successful protest under revised Officer of Management and Budget rules, the agency’s contracting officer refused to award the work to the DOE employees and instead reopened the competition, changing the source selection method to a “lowest cost, technically-acceptable” standard. And again, the contract was awarded to LAI and the agency dismissed another employee protest for lack of detail after the agency itself -- contrary to Government Accountability Office practice -- refused to provide the employees access to the bid of the private contractor for purposes of drafting the protest. And the result of this debacle that took nearly two years to run its course? Thousands of hours wasted, unconscionable extra cost to the taxpayer, and an unrealistic bid from the contractor with a high probability of cost overruns that the taxpayers will ultimately have to cover. Energy’s refusal to disclose the contractor’s bid to the employees means that the taxpayers and the employees have been deprived of a full airing of this decision. It is baseless, and it casts an air of suspicion over the entire competition. I would hope that in the future that Government Executive Magazine will learn from this experience not to blindly accept and print the platitudes of those who have a stake in putting the best “spin” in print, but that you provide your readers with the “whole” story. (Although the opinion presented here is the opinion of the Chapter 213 President of the National Treasury Employees Union, some of the material included was taken directly from memorandums distributed to union leaders by NTEU National President Ms. Colleen Kelley.) David Schoeberlein Posted July 25, 2006 2:33 PM