One of the two main innovation ideas is to use “advisory downselects” to give offerors information prior to a full-blown proposal about whether they are likely to be competitive for award, to encourage them to decide not to make a full proposal.
… A second popular PIL technique is the increased reliance on oral presentations. The basic idea of such presentations was to have company representatives speak in front of the contracting team rather than communicate only on paper… However, oral presentations quickly diverged quite radically from my original intention. Very soon they became highly scripted, well-rehearsed shows typically not by key personnel but by those in the company with the best acting skills or speaking voices. The slides were dazzling. But there was no back and forth. The PIL has tried to bring conversations, questions and back and forth back into oral presentations. There has been pushback from DHS lawyers about using material from oral presentations if the agency had no transcript of the conversations. Zoom, which allows recording of sessions, will hopefully have solved this problem, and we should be seeing more back and forth in future procurements.
That was a very interesting article from Steve Kelman, “Creating an infrastructure for procurement innovation at DHS.” That’s very understandable to think that oral presentations become pretty regimented. I wonder to what degree that back-and-forth is correlated with the contracting team’s specific technical knowledge, coupled with delegated authority for making consequential program decisions.
It appears that there is a problem of causality — that many good acquisition processes cannot be implemented because the workforce is rooted in the traditional ways, and that workforce issues can’t be resolved without also giving them new acquisition processes and throwing them into the wild.
I think your questions about the problem lying with the contracting workforce rather than the format hits the nail on the head. VCs see plenty of slick presentations from startups, but the system works because CEOs are challenged thoroughly on their claims by people who are familiar with technology. As you state, VCs having a stake in the acquisition also matters a great deal for how probing the pitch feedback is.
One fanciful idea might be to have vendors debate each other over whose solution is the best. It would incentivize them to tear holes in their competitors’ offerings. You would still need a savvy, interested workforce to evaluate which claims were evidence-based, but it would offload some of the mental work from the government employee to the companies.
As an aside, is it possible to modify the comment system? The comment box extends past the boundary of the column it is supposed to lie in, and there is no scroll wheel to move over. It makes composing more difficult than necessary.
“One fanciful idea might be to have vendors debate each other over whose solution is the best. It would incentivize them to tear holes in their competitors’ offerings.”
Really like that idea! Definitely not status quo thinking. Unfortunately, companies would complain that such a process would be tantamount to giving up trade secrets. How to get over that in reality?
Also, in the comment system (not my fav) you should be able to expand the box to your liking at the bottom right of the box.