CULTURE CHANGE: MEASURING ARMY CONTRACTING
T
he need to improve how we evaluate the Army’s contract- ing work and how we use that data is well documented; for
example, the U.S. Government Account- ability Office (GAO) issued a report in June 2017 titled “Army Contracting: Leadership Lacks Information Needed to Evaluate and Improve Operations.”
Te problems aren’t the Army’s alone. In 2019, the Section 809 Panel—formally the Advisory Panel on Streamlining and Codi- fying Acquisition Regulations, established by Congress in the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2016— recommended to “use existing defense business system open-data requirements to improve strategic decision making on acquisition and workforce issues.” Te panel, composed of recognized experts in acquisition and procurement policy across the public (uniformed and civilian) and private sectors, added that “DOD lacks the expertise to effectively use [enterprise- wide acquisition and financial data] for strategic planning and to improve deci- sion making.”
Te overall lead time for defense acquisi- tion is too long to keep up with great-power competitors and non-state actors. Te Section 809 Panel, which completed its mission in July 2019 having published a three-volume final report over the previ- ous 18 months, stressed this repeatedly. Te panel recommended a “war footing” approach whereby “rapidly and effec- tively acquiring warfighting capability and delivering it to service members takes precedence over achieving other public policy objectives.”
For the contracting workforce, this means a focus on the pre-award phase of contract- ing. Te Section 809 Panel recommends that we provide “products, and services at a speed that is closer to real time than
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It’s neither possible nor desirable to attempt to reduce the entirety of the contracting workload to something that one can determine upfront in terms of labor-hours.
the current acquisition process allows.” At the same time, the Army is implement- ing new enterprise-resource planning software, in part to produce better data about what occurs during the contract- ing process. Our leaders want to know: “What does success in contracting look like?” and “How can we ensure we’re allo- cating resources to the right things?” Tese are old questions asked with new urgency.
CURRENT METRICS AREN’T GREAT Measuring contracting tasks by requi- site labor hours could be a good solution for some of the routine actions needed in contracting. For example, selecting clauses for an upcoming requirement should take a certain amount of time, which should be easy to determine, based on the size and type of anticipated contract actions. Other examples include reviewing invoices, awarding commercial contracts below the simplified acquisition threshold, exercis- ing existing options, incremental funding modifications and data input. Data input typically includes the use of enterprise resource planners for contract award and
management; and other, more special- ized systems such as the Synchronized Predeployment and Operational Tracker, Trusted Associate Sponsorship System and Joint Contingency Contracting System.
Army contracting leadership currently tracks a subset of these routine contract- ing tasks for compliance on a go or no-go basis (i.e., whether the task has been completed for applicable contracts). Tese tasks include completing evaluations of contractor performance, contract close- outs, funding de-obligations, appointing a contracting officer representative and completing contract action reports.
Te problem is that we struggle with even these compliance (go or no-go) metrics. Tese should be easy to collect, but we still get bogged down frequently with new or updated enterprise resource plan- ners and determining who owns what actions. We’re a long way from a usable labor-hour model.
In addition, with the exception of complet- ing contractor evaluations and ensuring oversight by contracting officer represen- tatives, which of these compliance metrics currently measures something the Army should be prioritizing?
Tere are many other important processes we could be measuring (i.e., “quality metrics”). We could measure industry input on requirements. We could build a proposal difficulty score that rates how hard it is for vendors to participate in federal contracts, reflecting proposal sizes and evaluation sub-factors. It should be easy, with commercially available software, to score the readability and comprehen- sibility of requirements documents. We could measure how many of the best-value trade-off source selections (whereby we can exchange higher prices for improved performance) end up awarded to the
Army AL&T Magazine Winter 2021
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