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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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In my earlier post, I commented on the "risk averse" nature of government acquisition. In our efforts to be fair to all, the manuals that we use grow longer and longer (e.g., the Federal Acquisition Regulations, supplemental Agency Regulations, Acquisition Policies, GAO decisions). This is an environment that has not embraced change and new technology, and for good reason.
When I asked around my office for volunteers to work on the pilot, not a lot of hands went up. A few brave souls eventually snuck over to my office to learn more, and finally we formed a team. We have a Contracting Officer, a Contract Specialist, a Project Manager, a few Technical Advisors, and an Acquisition Project Manager who will have to pull all of this together. Hopefully, I'll get to help steer all of this along without disrupting the rest of the organization's daily operations.
We spent the last two months evaluating the recommendations on BetterBuy, identifying the ideas that were feasible to implement, and working with our information technology support personnel to set up the infrastructure properly. We met with OMB, GAO, and other parts of GSA to discuss best practices for open collaboration, making decisions about things like user registration and authentication, roles and responsibilities for team members (e.g., who controls our twitter account, who can post). We are nearly ready with our wiki site for requirements definition. This process shines a bright light on established procedures and forces everyone to consider the value of the activity. Fun times!
My office (GSA FEDSIM) primarily works with other Federal Agencies on their procurements, but we also support a few internal GSA customers as well. We have been talking to these internal customers as the most likely candidates for the pilot project(s). We have two in our sights. Both are working with new technology and align well with the increased transparency through BetterBuy. We plan on launching the pilot in February, so stay tuned. . . . .
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