Marketplace

Transition Tips on Boosting Reform

December 1, 2000

s we await the new administration, the wheels of government are still turning, although more slowly. Many federal managers have gone through this process and know that it's time to prepare transition papers to tell the new team what they do and why it's important. Kenneth Oscar, head of the Office of Management and Budget's Office of Federal Procurement Policy, would include the following points in a transition paper, arguing that agencies must not just maintain, but accelerate acquisition reform:

Enhance the workforce.
Continue to simplify and streamline.
Promote e-commerce.

Enhancing the Workforce
The acquisition workforce is experiencing the same retirement and capacity problems common across government: bringing new employees on board quickly, keeping the right people and ensuring that effective training is available.

Acquisition managers face the problem of waiting six months or more to hire new staff members, according to Oscar. He has assembled a team to determine what policy changes are needed to allow agencies to fill these positions expeditiously.

In Oscar's view, one way to keep procurement specialists and make sure they have the right skills is to establish a growth path for acquisition professionals. This path would be similar to the one followed by lawyers or scientists, allowing them to rise in grade without links to the number of people they supervise. For years, OMB has followed a similar model for its budget staff members.

OMB has recognized that these senior employees' enhanced technical skills and experience are valuable to the office's mission. Oscar sees similar benefits for the acquisition mission as employees broaden their skills and acquire more competencies. The General Services Administration's Federal Acquisition Institute plans to identify a new set of competencies for acquisition employees. This list of competencies will help provide a framework for linking skills, performance and grade levels.

Oscar has also been working with the institute and the Defense Acquisition University to expand training across the government. He has encouraged the Defense university to open up its offerings to civilian employees. At the same time, he has encouraged the acquisition institute to create a governmentwide database that would provide more details on training courses, and he has urged agencies to join together to develop new courses.

In line with these efforts, Oscar is working with the Federal Acquisition Institute to develop a "knowledge management" Web site that will provide managers at any agency with templates for all kinds of contracts as well as training information.

Simplifying and Streamlining

A lot has been done to reform the acquisition process, including using charge cards and lifting the small purchase threshold, but Oscar says much more needs to be done. Two areas he is focusing on are automating the Federal Acquisition Regulation and streamlining the FAR's contract format. Ironically, acquisition reform has "streamlined" the FAR from 1,500 to 1,900 pages, Oscar says. Automating the document, he says, could be cut it in half just by reducing redundancy. "Did you know that there are five different definitions of the United States of America in the FAR?" Oscar says.

Oscar is exploring ways to make it easier for both contract and proposal writers to understand agencies' needs. "The current contract is too daunting," Oscar says. "We need to trim it and simplify it." Drawing on an earlier Army-Air Force effort, Oscar suggests a reengineered format that would condense the FAR's uniform contract of 13 sections into only six, all written in plain English.

Promoting E-Commerce
On the e-commerce front, Oscar points to FedBizOpps.Gov as the place anyone can go to determine agency procurement needs. While only 20 agencies are linked to the site, he expects that all will be online by the end of the year. Pulling together each agency's offerings and presenting them at one site is a tremendous accomplishment that should make it much easier for any firm to identify agency needs and respond to them.

Oscar is working on ways to bring information on grants, asset disposal and real property to the Internet using the FirstGov.Gov site. The goal is to create a keyword approach so that a person looking for information doesn't have to specify a Web site. The searcher would just need to know a subject area, rather than which agency funds it.

A Web-enabled federal procurement data system, where information will ultimately flow directly from electronic contract files, offers tremendous benefits for anyone wanting to see how the acquisition process is working and where federal funds are going. Currently, data are transcribed by hand and, therefore, the information provided has been suspect. This approach would avoid the transcription errors that have continued to plague the system.

Acquisition reform is a critical issue for managers to address in their transition papers. It's hard to believe any administration wouldn't want to pursue goals that would hone the skills of acquisition professionals and simplify the procurement process.

Allan V. Burman, a former Office of Federal Procurement Policy administrator, is president of Jefferson Solutions in Washington. Contact him at aburman@govexec.com.