All Learning Content
Possible Government Shutdown? Here’s What Federal Contractors Need to Know
Aug 16, 2017
Budget experts say federal contractors should be prepared for a possible government shutdown on Oct. 1. Since this happened in 2013, contracting officers may be better equipped to answer questions about agencies’ shutdown preparations and how they’ll implement guidance from the Office of...
Brexit Negotiations and What To Do If You’re Thirsty!
Aug 15, 2017
Strategy and tactics for the Brexit negotiations are clearly complex for all parties. We can argue about how much of it is genuinely win: win in nature and which elements are somewhat more binary. In some areas, if the UK doesn’t pay an element of the “divorce” settlement, then the other 27...
Virginia-based IT Firm Tagged with $16m False Claims Settlement
Aug 15, 2017
Virginia IT products and services company, ADS Inc., has agreed to settle with the government over allegations of false claims and fraud in federal small business contracts. The defense contractor and their subsidiaries will pay the U.S. government $16 million to settle the False Claims Act...
Federal Contractor Summertime Blues: 5 Steps to Staying on Track
Aug 14, 2017
To everything there is a season. No one knows this more than companies that do business with the Federal government; the Federal procurement season that is. Summer, especially late summer of July through September, is 4th quarter of the Federal calendar year, and many Federal contractors mirror...
Price Realism: Agency Didn’t Compare Proposed Rates To Incumbent Rates
Aug 14, 2017
An incumbent contractor won a protest at GAO recently where it argued that the awardee’s labor rates were too low, because they were lower than the rates the incumbent itself was paying the same people.
GAO faulted the agency for concluding that the awardee’s price was realistic without...
Supplier Relationship Management Webinar – Highly Applicable To Government As Well As Private Firms
Aug 14, 2017
A couple of weeks ago, our friend David Atkinson led a webinar as part of the BravoSolution Real World Procurement series. The title was “Supplier Relationship and Value Management – the Five Programme Killers and How to Overcome Them”.
It was an excellent session from Atkinson, who had a...
SmallGovCon Week In Review: August 7-11, 2017
Aug 11, 2017
I don’t know about you, but I am ready for the weekend. I’m looking forward to spending some time with the family before I turn into a bit of a road warrior. Next week, I’ll be at the 21st Government Procurement Conference in Texas; the following week I head to the West Coast for...
As Sure As Tax, Rain, Death: Digitalisation Dragons? (Part I)
Aug 10, 2017
Digialisation Dragons (Detail from a 15th century miniature in the British Library).
We hear about disruptive technologies and live in a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous). New technologies will change business models as they have always done. However the four VUCA factors...
Suppliers Who Fail To Deliver – A Public Procurement Dilemma
Aug 10, 2017
The EU and national procurement regulations and defined processes are designed to achieve several objectives. They aim to achieve the best value supply for the taxpayer, to open up and stimulate public sector supply markets and to protect the citizen against fraud and corruption. They also often...
Does Spend Visibility Really Matter to Your Spend Capacity?
Aug 10, 2017
Accurate budget planning is one of the most challenging tasks of government operations today. However, budget cuts, program eliminations, and spending reductions should be made to support policy goals. eProcurement platforms make it easy to gain complete visibility into historical and current...
GSA’s $11 Billion HR Training Vehicle Slowly Picking Up
Aug 10, 2017
The General Services Administration (GSA) is seeing slow, steady growth for its Human Capital and Training Solutions (HCATS) government-wide contract. Tiffany Hixson, the assistant commissioner for GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service’s Office of Professional Services and Human Capital Categories,...
How to Be Strategic in Public Procurement and Government Contracting
Aug 10, 2017
It seems like every purchasing/acquisition leader I talk with (in both the private and public sectors,) as well as many or most of the practitioner-directed literature I read discusses their organization’s transformational journey. In my experience, most purchasing/acquisition organizations claim...
