How does the Government view Performance Base Contracting?

Happy New Year to All!

I hope this year brings success to your respected companies and these Monday Morning Contracting Tips supports your efforts. 

Doing business with the Federal Government requires companies to understand how the government operate under their Acquisition Process.

How does the Government view Performance Base Contracting.   

When government consider performance based contracting, they do not lose sight of the reason for using this technique. Its purpose is to obtain better performance or lower costs or both. In other

words, things should work better and cost less.

Contractor Capability

Basic to the concept of performance-based contracting is to adopt contracting specifications and procedures permitting the contractor to devise the most efficient and effective way to perform the work. However, drafting of statements of work which enable contractors to use their initiative is only part of the task. Choosing a capable and trustworthy contractor is absolutely essential. Thus, past performance evaluations and partnering are necessary ingredients to selecting the contractor and working with it.

There are Seven Steps that the Federal Government use in Performance Based Acquisitions

1.            Establish the Team

2.            Decide what problem needs solving

3.            Examine private-sector and public-sector solutions

4.            Develop a PWS or SOO

5.            Manage Performance 

All the Best

Improve Your Company's Contracting Growth

Capture Management and Proposal Training: Every company should have career development plans for its employees and offer professional development training for its management, key employees and especially for those people involved in business development, capture management, and proposal development. They should also provide training in proposal writing for technical and managerial professionals to help them write more compelling proposals.

Business Acquisition Process: It is principle that having a well-structured business acquisition process increases business acquisition effectiveness and reduces cost. Documenting these processes is the first step in raising the maturity of the business acquisition process. All companies of any reasonable size should have defined, repeatable businesses acquisition processes covering the business development, capture, pre-proposal preparation, proposal development, and post-proposal submission phases of the business acquisition life cycle. These processes should be fully supported by management and used for all new business acquisition.


Capture Management: Companies should evaluate every new business pursuit monthly and make an affirmative decision to continue, delay or suspend the pursuit. If no reviews are conducted, then every new business opportunity remains in play, even when it is clear that the company can’t win. Proper capture management reduces the effort spent on opportunities that are likely to be losers and focuses effort on opportunities with a better chance of winning. Measuring capture progress and making associated management decisions also are essential parts of the business acquisition process and necessary for increasing your win rate.


Management Decisions: The purpose of gate reviews is to ensure that management makes timely decisions about continuing to invest in a new business opportunity and to provide an opportunity for executive management to coach the capture team on how to raise its win probability. These gate reviews are fundamental to effective and efficient acquisition of new business.


Annotated Outlines: Annotated outlines or storyboards probably are not used. If they are used, they are not reviewed and approved by management. No wonder there is so much rewriting involved in completing typical proposals.


Proposal Quality: Professionally developed proposals do not have these problems. They are always compliant, compelling and responsive. Major improvements in proposal quality are still need by many companies.


Performance: Execute contracts to standards in accordance with SOW/Solicitation. Consider compliance, administrative and management requirements

Monday Morning Contracting Tips

Inside the Critical Bid/No Bid Decision

What’s the key to determining whether or not to bid on a federal contract, “Knowledge” The best informed company “Wins”

15 Important factor in making a bid decision

1.      Are you completely informed about the opportunity?  

2.      How well do know the customer?

3.      How well do you understand the customer’s requirements?

4.      What kind of credibility or experience you’ve had with that customer?

5.      What is the competition and its capabilities?

6.      Do you understand the work?

7.      Do you understand what the customer’s mission?  

8.      Do you have the current talent on staff to understand the technology?

9.      Is this a small proposal effort that you can accomplish with our internal team?

10.  Do we have the team in place to provide a compliant, compelling proposal?

11.  Does the opportunity fit your company strategically?

12.  Will pursuing this contract help you achieve our financial objectives as a company?

13.  What are your parameters around the bid process?

14.  Do you need to partner with somebody, team with somebody?

15.  What are the go-no go guidelines you’re setting and stick to them?

What are the government challenges as they enter into the 4th Quarter Spending? Meeting the Set-Aside Goals

It will be very important to position your company for Set-Aside Contracts during the 4^th Quarter of the federal government fiscal year. For the sixth year in a row, the government has missed its goal to award 23% of all federal contract dollars to small businesses. On Tuesday, July 3, the Small Business Administration reported that federal agencies gave out 21.7% to small companies. That sounds close, but means that small businesses did not receive $3.8 billion set aside for them. The contracts are awarded by all federal departments for a wide array of projects and jobs. They funnel hundreds of billions of dollars every year to the private sector.

The awarding goal, which was raised slightly to 23% in 1997, was part of the same 1953 law that established the SBA. It was created to support small companies and avoid having large ones awarded all the federal contracts. But the government has missed the target consistently. Small businesses have missed out on at least $25.7 billion in contracts since 2006, the last year the government reached its goal.The SBA did not provide comment about the failure of agencies to meet the goal. It pointed to a blog post that discussed its efforts to minimize fraud and increase participation of small companies.

The chairman of the House Small Business Committee, Rep. Sam Graves (R-MO), has pushed legislation that aims to increase transparency in contracting and punish the agencies that fail to meet the goal. The legislation also provides for educating contracting officers who often mislabel contracts worth millions as "small business" contracts, even though they're directed to subsidiaries of major corporations. A provision in the legislation also raises the goal from 23% to 25%, which sounds unrealistic given the track record. But Graves insists even the higher target is achievable.

"Solutions to both of these problems can be accomplished at the same time. The goal hasn't been met, because there hasn't been an incentive for agency staff to do so," Graves said. The government has reached its 23% target only three times in the past dozen years. One group long critical of federal contracting procedures said the situation is worse than it appears.

The American Small Business League, which analyzes thousands of contracts every year, points to mistakes by federal contract officers and said they inflate the numbers.

SAM takes over CCR and ORCA at end of May – check your records now!

On May 29, 2012, Central Contractor Registration (CCR) and Online Representations and Certifications (ORCA) are scheduled to undergo a revolutionary change. Both of these federal vendor registration services will be replaced by a new system called SAM – System for Award Management. SAM is being managed by the General Services Administration – GSA.

Over a period of the next several years, SAM will consolidate nine government databases.

What this means to vendors:

Your existing CCR and ORCA registrations are scheduled to be automatically transferred to SAM on May 29th.

While GSA hopes for a smooth transition to the new SAM system, there likely will be some hiccups. During the transition, difficulties can be expected with new registrations and re-registrations. Since CCR contains over 600,000 active registrants, annual re-registrations alone average about 2,000 per business day. Even a small glitch could backlog the help desk, and with 2,000 daily updates, a backlog of problems has the potential to grow very quickly.

What you should do:

Check the expiration date of your current CCR and ORCA registrations. If either of your registrations are scheduled to expire in the next few months (May, June, July), we advise you to renew your registrations now.

Taking care of your registration renewal now will allow you to avoid getting caught-up in the rush of renewals and new registrations that are sure to occur in late May and in the months of June and July.

To check your CCR expiration date, just go to https://www.bpn.gov/ccr, click on “CCR Search” near the top of the screen, and enter your DUNS number or CAGE code to review your registration. You can check your ORCA registration by going to https://orca.bpn.gov/ and entering your DUNS number. If you are due to renew either of these registration systems any time between now and the end of the year, we urge you log in and update your CCR and ORCA registration before the end of this month (May 2012). Your updated registrations will be good for one year.

Taking action now will assure that you will not have a critical need to update your records until well after any system transition problems are solved.

A fact sheet on the new SAM system can be downloaded here: SAM Flyer 2012

JE Group launches’ its ICA

I will be departing Monday May 14, 2012 for The UAE (Dubai). JE Group will be officially launching our International Consortium Alliance (ICA), an initiative supported by a Public Private Partnership with the TAOE Foundation.

The ICA is designed for JE Group (SDVOSB) to integrate and deploy a defined business-to-business best practices model with international companies to pursue Federal Government Contracts. JE Group will be responsible for Pre and Post award Business Development, Contract Administration, Contract Compliance and Contract Management services for its strategic alliance partners. Our process methodology is designed to proactively position international businesses to bring solutions via services and products. We seek to identify means to deploy community sustainability using government contracting and corporate alliances as a primary resource to facilitate and expedite growth in various regions.

WHY DO COMPANIES EXPAND INTERNATIONALLY?

6 Quick Fixes that will Improve Your Company’s Win Rate

1. Capture and Proposal Training: Only 52 percent of the companies surveyed provide career development and professional training for their business development, capture management, and proposal development staffs.

Every company should have career development plans for its employees and offer professional development training for its management, key employees and especially for those people involved in business development, capture management, and proposal development. They should also provide training in proposal writing for technical and managerial professionals to help them write more compelling proposals.

Companies can develop these training programs internally or contract the training to companies that provide such specialized training. However you do it, some training is better than no training. By offering this kind of training, you can immediately leapfrog half the companies in your market.

2. Business Acquisition Process: 54 percent of the companies surveyed have not documented their business acquisition processes.

It is an indisputable principle that having a well-structured business acquisition process increases business acquisition effectiveness and reduces cost, yet half the companies surveyed compete using undocumented processes. Documenting these processes is the first step in raising the maturity of the business acquisition process. All companies of any reasonable size should have defined, repeatable businesses acquisition processes covering the business development, capture, pre-proposal preparation, proposal development, and post-proposal submission phases of the business acquisition life cycle. These processes should be fully supported by management and used for all new business acquisition.

3. Capture Management: Only 33 percent of companies review their capture progress and use these reviews to make management decisions about pursuing or continuing to pursue new business opportunities.

Companies should evaluate every new business pursuit monthly and make an affirmative decision to continue, delay or suspend the pursuit. If no reviews are conducted, then every new business opportunity remains in play, even when it is clear that the company can’t win. Proper capture management reduces the effort spent on opportunities that are likely to be losers and focuses effort on opportunities with a better chance of winning. Measuring capture progress and making associated management decisions also are essential parts of the business acquisition process and necessary for increasing your win rate.

4. Management Decisions: Only 45 percent of companies surveyed use gate reviews as part of their business acquisition process.

The purpose of gate reviews is to ensure that management makes timely decisions about continuing to invest in a new business opportunity and to provide an opportunity for executive management to coach the capture team on how to raise its win probability. These gate reviews are fundamental to effective and efficient acquisition of new business.

5. Annotated Outlines: 70 percent of proposal writers begin writing their assigned sections before

management has approved what they are going to write.

Annotated outlines or storyboards probably are not used. If they are used, they are not reviewed and approved by management. No wonder there is so much rewriting involved in completing typical proposals.

6. Proposal Quality: 37 percent of companies surveyed said their proposals suffer from errors that could cause them to lose bids.

Professionally developed proposals do not have these problems. They are always compliant, compelling and responsive. Major improvements in proposal quality are still need by many companies.