Learning & Skills

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...

It’s true: my boss Raj Sharma hates networking. That statement may raise a few eyebrows, but stick with me for a second, because what he really hates is the term and its implications. To Raj, “networking” implies a numbers game of quid pro quo transactions that looks good on paper. But what...

If you haven’t yet, you should check out our brand new Public Spend Forum YouTube channel, where we’re posting a lot of short videos that offer practical tips to help you in your job every day. In one of our latest, retired Air Force acquisition officer and author Dan Ward talks about a really...

On Thursday, October 27th Public Spend Forum welcomed Dan Ward to share stories about simple innovation from a 20+ year career at the US Air Force. In addition to great storytelling and noble attempts at humor, Dan offered specific strategies that you can use right away to solve on-job challenges...

Thank you to everyone who attended our webinar on simple innovation with special guest Dan Ward. To earn your continuous learning credit, please take a moment to fill out this survey. It consists of four comprehension questions and three general questions about the content and quality of...

Strategic market analysis is a much-needed tool in the public sector shed, and yet it’s often overlooked for more short-term, transactional capabilities. This introduction to strategic market analysis helps define why market intelligence is important, what role it plays in...

We are back with new episodes of the Public Impact Podcast, the only podcast telling stories of success and innovation in the public sector. These are stories that you won’t always read in the newspaper, but that need to shared and celebrated. Like our episode this week, about creating a 21st...

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...

In the first article on driving value in public procurement, I outlined four areas where you can achieve the many goals of procurement while also fulfilling your mission needs. In other words, ways to get the most value out of the work you do. Those levers were split into four groups:...

The other morning I received an email from a federal contract specialist asking my opinion about whether open-source software is a commercial item subject to the Federal Acquisition Regulation’s (FAR) Part 12 commercial item procedures. The question is a great one with important implications: an...

Federal Contracting Professionals Can Use These Flexible Arrangements To Maximize Procurement Outcomes We ran a story in our daily Public Spend Forum Newswire about the Army’s intent to establish a Basic Ordering Agreement (BOA) to support its transition of legacy applications into the commercial...

You hear it time and again: If it weren’t for the regulations, we’d have loads of innovation in the public sector. Nowhere in government is there a more maligned document than the FAR, the Federal Acquisition Regulation, which has been blamed for any number of hurdles and failures in federal...