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About the Better Buy Project/Frequently Asked Questions
- Why the Federal Acquisition Process?
- What Topics Are At Issue?
- What Kind Of Feedback Are You Looking For?
Why the Federal Acquisition Process?
On his first day in office, President Obama challenged leaders in government to "use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperate among themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector." The acquisition process represents one of the most important areas of collaboration between government and the private sector.
Unfortunately, it is also among the most complex and least transparent. The Better Buy Project is an experiment dedicated to the belief that there's a lot of room for improvement in the way government buys products and services. We're testing this hypothesis by asking for your ideas on how to make acquisition process more open, transparent and collaborative.
The best part of this project is that the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) GSA would really like to adopt some of your best ideas. Promising ideas will be selected by GSA to be piloted on an upcoming acquisition, where lessons learned will be captured for future implementation. But that really depends on us, and the ideas we're able to produce.
What Topics Are At Issue?
This project is concerned primarily with the pre-contract-award stages of the acquisition process—the activities that take place before the government "signs on the dotted line" to buy a product or service. Those areas are:
- Market Research and Requirements Definition Phase—Includes publicizing agency needs and requirements, and refining them based on further input and research about current capabilities.
- Pre-Solicitation Phase—Includes web-based research, discussions with other federal agencies, meetings and open discussion forums with the private sector to discuss potential solutions, and requests for information soliciting input and ideas. The requirements are also further refined at this stage in the process.
- Solicitation Phase—Includes the government notifying the private sector of the requirement through various channels such as E-Buy and FedBizOpps, holding open forums to discuss the requirement and answer questions (e.g., Industry Days), a review of the solicitation by interested companies, the written exchange between government and the private sector of questions, answers and clarifications on government requirements, and proposal submissions.
The ultimate goal is to improve how government learns about and chooses what it buys—in other words, to make government a more informed, more effective consumer.
What Kind of Feedback Are You Looking For?
We are looking for ideas to make federal acquisition more open, transparent, and collaborative. What does that mean?
- Open—Raise awareness of upcoming needs government is trying to fulfill, in order to assemble a pool of qualified providers who can compete on specific requirements.
- Transparent—Give the public and interested parties timely data on upcoming and ongoing buying activities, with the goal of promoting fair and high-quality competitions.
- Collaborative—Find ways for the government to engage in more ‘open’ conversations with the private sector on topics such as best practices, emerging technologies and innovations, and market conditions.
We believe that making the process more open, transparent and collaborative will make government more likely to end up with the right item at the right price.
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A couple of the key questions that agencies continue to ask about social media is "How do I make a business case for it?" and "How do I measure success?" Ultimately, those agencies that have answered these questions effectively - in advance of starting their project and all along the implementation path - will become best practice examples. The Better Buy Project and its incubation group on GovLoop (Acquisition 2.0) are quickly becoming one of those best practice examples.
Two weeks ago, Adam Schultz (BoldInteractive) and I attempted to respond to these questions through a presentation for the Advanced Learning Institute's Social Media for Government Conference. We developed a methodology that strives to move agencies from mission to measurement in a few steps. We know it's not that simple, but here's the general outline of the method:
1. Define Mission Achievement
2. Map Achievement Path
3. Locate Stakeholders
4. Design Engagement
5. Measure Outcomes
6. Inform Next Steps
We fleshed out these concepts for workshop participants over the course of three hours. You can view the full presentation below:
While an afternoon wasn't nearly enough time for participants to apply it to their day-to-day endeavors, we were able to apply it to the Acquisition 2.0 Group on GovLoop and its evolution to include the Better Buy Project. See slides 22-29 and 32-34 for a self-explanatory application to the first four steps for the Acquisition 2.0 group and the Better Buy Project, respectively. We thought you might appreciate some commentary on several of the slides:
Slide 30: This slide offers a Google Analytics look at the traffic for the Acquisition 2.0 group on GovLoop between its launch on March 23 and December 5. Where are the spikes? Well, the first one was right around July 1. What happened? That was our first event, a panel at GSA. There's another big jump right around mid-July. What was happening? The Open Government and Innovations conference. I could almost guarantee that the spikes in September and October were also due to events or news articles. In fact, we're seeing another flurry of activity in the Acquisition after last week's panel at NAPA.
TAKE-AWAY: When we come together physically, we accelerate our conversations virtually...and we need places like GovLoop and Better Buy to sustain and build upon those in-person conversations.
Okay, so maybe that's a bit of an overstatement. But the BetterBuy Project has been making some media appearances that we thought you might like to know about:
First, there's this Federal News Radio interview with our ringleader, GSA's Mary Davie. Speaking from the 2009 Executive Leadership Conference in Williamsburg, VA, Mary talks to FNR's Daily Debrief about the most exciting part of BetterBuy: The fact that GSA will actually be piloting some of the best ideas on real live acquisitions.
Mary also noted that part of the impetus behind BetterBuy was a great blog post by Andy Krzmarzick, formerly of USDA and now officially GovLoop's second employee, entitled "10 Ways Social Media Will Streamline Federal Acquisition". It's must-reading for anyone interested in what we're doing, or in Acquisition 2.0 generally.
Secondly: Our moms always said we had a face for radio, but I guess Federal Computer Week wasn't listening, because they went ahead and put BetterBuy on the cover! Check it out:
The full cover story, by FCW's ace Acquisition Editor Matthew Weigelt, reads, in part:
Although years of outsourcing and impending retirements threaten to drain the acquisition workforce of its most experienced contracting officers, the procurements that jam the inboxes of the remaining employees aren't getting any less complicated. They need new methods and faster ways to award contracts quickly and successfully, administration officials say.Amen!As a result, the acquisition community is turning to Acquisition 2.0.
Described simply, Acquisition 2.0 is about thinking differently and putting new procedures into play. Government officials and insiders are gathering to pose questions -- both philosophical and practical -- to one another at conferences and virtual meetings. They are also turning to social-networking sites in search of others' expertise.
The ultimate goals are efficiency, cost savings and better performance, say those who are leading the movement.
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