Finding Quality Help

You have been charged with strategic planning, developing performance measures, implementing quality management and exploring business process reengineering. The only problem: The folks in your office don't know their BPRs from their TQMs and you don't know where to begin.

Beginning this fall, the General Services Administration will enable agencies to find management reform specialists in one place: the Federal Supply Service's Management Organizational and Business Improvement Services schedule (MOBIS). The MOBIS schedule will provide a single source for agencies to review and obtain management consultants without having to conduct their own full-blown searches. Until the MOBIS schedule takes effect in October, agencies can obtain quality management consulting services through the service's quality management schedule.

Catherine Maloney, a Federal Supply Service contract specialist, said the change to a broader management services schedule recognizes an "expansion of what quality means."

"Total quality management has a specific narrow connotation," Maloney said. Now agencies want to know: "What do you do after TQM?"

FSS has tried to make things easier for agencies by seeking out and selecting potential contractors, reviewing their past performance, checking the education and experience of their employees and negotiating labor categories, rates and hours. Agencies using the schedule do not have to advertise in the Commerce Business Daily. And the schedule meets the requirements of the Competition in Contracting Act, an important consideration for contracting officers.

But even with the schedule, picking the right method for management reform and the right vendor is no easy task.

For example, FSS urges agencies who use the schedule to develop a clear statement of work for potential contractors. But managers embarking on the unfamiliar paths of quality management and reengineering may not know what questions to ask and what requirements to set.

"A lot of agencies don't know what they don't know," said Jeffrey Manthos, an FSS program analyst. Before managers turn to the quality management or MOBIS schedules, they have to do a lot of homework.

Furthermore, FSS cannot make the past performance data it collects on contractors available to agencies, though it does plan to start surveying contractors' customers in the future. Also, agencies cannot yet seek a single contract from the schedule that would integrate reengineering, systems integration and financial auditing. Each of those services must be puchased through separate schedules.

The Federal Supply Service presented its quality management schedule and previewed the MOBIS schedule on Wednesday at the Federal Quality Conference in Washington. Stay tuned to Govexec.com this week for more conference coverage.