The larger the acquisition involved, the more people get involved. Just to get the RFP [Request for Proposal] out the door on the government side, you have people like the user, the program manager, the economic decider, then you add a contract specialist potentially, and of course you have the contracting officer, you may have a small business specialist, depending on how big of a program you have a budget analyst, and you may even have a pricer, and of course you start adding lawyers, you have the procurement analyst — who is usually approving your overall acquisition strategy and steps along the way.
And then each of these people has a supervisor, and maybe even their staff is going to be looking at it. So for example if you go to the director of procurement, their staff along the way is also going to look at it. So you may have only gone up one layer, but you’re getting like three or four different people looking at it. It exponentially increases the number of cooks in the kitchen — or the number of people getting to vote on the vacation.
That was an episode from the Contracting Officer Podcast called “What causes RFP delays?” The biggest problem is that all the voices have the authority to veto or delay program decisions, but none but top management can approve it. Usually, rather than being obstructionist and vetoing a program, bureaucratic layers extract concessions from the program — whether they be of technical requirements or regulations and reporting — and while no single concession will destroy the program, the cumulative effect can be disastrous.
Here is a little bit more on the conflicting viewpoints which can drive up RFP language to hundreds of pages:
There are lots of opinions about what strategy to use. The user is going to want the best-ever solution. The contracting officer is going to want the best deal, which may be the cheapest but not always, but it’s going to be the best deal. The economic decider, who is the person who wants the funds to be obligated, they just want to get it done. So the combination, who have a user who wants quality, and economic decider who wants speed, and a CO [contracting officer] who wants the best deal, those are conflicting — they are different opinions. And then you have the compliance folks, they just want to make sure it’s done right and they’re not necessarily as concerned about speed, or about the best deal, they just want it done right, by the process.
Another issue the podcast brings up is that when RFPs get delayed, then the budget allocated to that program objective may have expired. You have, for example, only 2 years to obligate RDT&E funding. If you’re delayed, then the service staff will make sure the funding goes somewhere. But that doesn’t mean that it will get paid back in the next budget when you’ve gotten all your approvals. Your program may fall to the end of the priorities list as cost growth on other systems suck up all the available funding. Here is more from the podcast:
Just before the award, if the expectation was, “we’re going to have enough funding for the program,” and now its going to take six months longer to award it, and then something else comes up, then you’re now above or below the cut line. What are the priorities of that agency? Well if you’re at the bottom of that cut line — you were above it, and whoops, now you’re below it, just like that — you’ve lost you’re funding, which means you don’t have the ability to buy something.
I can’t tell you how many times, we’ve been mid-acquisition planning to acquire something new, and another big program in the agency has a massive overrun show up and all the money gets sucked out of everyone else’s budget to go pay those bills to solve problems. And you’re left empty handed.
Leave a Reply