Building Post-Award Trust Between Industry and Government
Feb 14, 2017
Note: This post is co-authored by Tim Cooke, CEO of ASI Government, and Dan Chenok, executive director of the IBM Center for the Business of Government.
Recently, the Professional Services Council’s Outcomes-Oriented Acquisition Working Group Chair Tim Cooke joined with me, IBM Center for the...
Social Audits in the Supply Chain – ‘A Diagnostic Tool that Doesn’t Fix Things’
Jan 27, 2017
We have been writing quite substantially lately about responsible procurement, corporate social responsibility, and human rights in the supply chain. Our posts on the Greenwich Symposium on Human Rights and Public Procurement covered issues such as the high-profile risks that occur in mass...
What contracting executives really think about government acquisition
Jan 27, 2017
While the rest of Washington was preparing for the inauguration, 80 GS-15 feds—generally supervisors and top-level executives—were headed to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for an intensive four-week executive education program at the Harvard Kennedy School (no picnic, lots of reading and preparing)...
Innovation and Public Procurement – Competition Must Still Be The Norm
Jan 27, 2017
There’s an interesting article on the Out-Law website (from Pinsent Masons, the leading law firm), which relate to a UK parliamentary committee discussion about innovation in science and technology.
Jo Johnson, the UK minister for universities, science, research and innovation (and brother of...
SpaceX and Breaking the Federal Contracting Mold
Jan 4, 2017
Before the holidays I came across a piece in Fortune called The Great Rocket Race. The article details the feverish efforts underway by the United Space Alliance, a decade-old joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin that launches space satellites for NASA, to cut its price per launch by...
Public Procurement Best Practices Exchange Hits London and the United Kingdom
Sep 21, 2016
Last week, we held the kick-off meeting for the Public Spend Forum Best Practices Exchange in the UK. The Exchange has been a feature of the Public Spend Forum program in the USA for a year or more now, one of the elements of the PSF initiative launched by Raj Sharma and his team. Nancy Clinton and...
Other Transaction Authority (Advanced) Workshop
Aug 18, 2016
Do you want to develop applicable expertise in Other Transaction Authority (OTA)?
This hands-on workshop takes you through the entire process of awarding and competing for OTAs, from planning through award and administration.
This is NOT a day off. You will NOT sit back and sip coffee as slide...
Challenges and Prizes Toolkit: GSA’s Guide to Getting It Right
Dec 22, 2016
We’ve written a lot recently about the effectiveness of challenges and prizes in public procurement, particularly in bringing in potential suppliers who exist far outside the orbit of the standard marketplace. The U.S. Agency for International Development, for instance, has used challenges to...
Twelve Key Competencies for the Public Procurement Workforce – Quick Reference Guide
Dec 19, 2016
Developed in coordination with the Volcker Alliance, our draft model of the key competencies that are required for the public procurement workforce identifies 12 key competencies critical to every public procurement organization.
This quick reference guide lays out and describes all twelve....
The Story of DHS’s Reverse Industry Days – A New Approach To Public Procurement
Dec 15, 2016
I had the great fortune to speak with several leaders in government and industry about a novel approach to improving communication: the reverse industry day. At a time when seemingly everyone agrees that collaboration between government and industry leaves a lot to be desired, it is refreshing to...
Is Raising the Micro-Purchase Threshold a Good Idea?
Dec 9, 2016
Ace government watchdogs the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) flagged proposed language included in the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would raise the micro-purchase threshold—essentially the limit that can be spent via a government purchase card—from $3,000 to...
Five Minutes to Better Memos
Dec 5, 2016
The procurement profession demands strong writing capabilities. Unfortunately, writing skills aren’t necessarily innate, and it is always easier to write poorly than to write with clear purpose and brevity. The good news is you don’t have to be Shakespeare or even Peter Drucker to write...
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Policies and Regulations
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Past performance is an important step in being successful as a federal government contractor. Once firms get into the mid-tier range, they normally have amassed …
A few months back, we published several articles about the very interesting – and somewhat shocking – court case around the UK’s Nuclear Decommissioning …
Perspectives and Insights
I have been interested in the question of getting successful commercial companies, especially tech companies, to sell to the government from the time I was …
The Contractor Accountability and Transparency Act of 2017 (S. 651), introduced by Sens. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Jon Tester, D-Mont., is yet another example of a …
Think you know all about public sector owned professional buying organisations (PBOs) and what they do? Here are ten interesting facts that might just surprise …