COMMENTARY
Finally, the right effort—and right amount of it—should be up to other experienced KOs to analyze. Commissioned officers who serve in this role should concern themselves primarily with becoming experts who can perform and critique these aspects of contracting, to ensure that the workforce remains focused on the Soldier and capability overmatch.
OBSERVATIONS ON THE WORKFORCE AND IMPROVING OUTCOMES 1. Implementing new systems will stymie the workforce in the short term. Atul Gawande, a surgeon and public-health researcher, wrote a 2018 article for Te New Yorker titled “Why Doctors Hate Teir Computers,” in which he described the “revenge of the ancil- laries.” Te struggle is the result of the system design choices being more political than technical: Tose doing medical billing have different concerns than doctors do, but the recommendations of the administrators become part of the software the doctors must use (to their irritation).
Tis is a useful analogy for the burden of new enterprise resource planning software on the workforce. We should better forecast updates of the software and enable the average worker to provide suggestions on improving systems. A solution might be to form a single U.S. Army Contracting Command office that seeks input when creating Army systems and consolidates Army workforce input for other DOD systems.
2. Te Army contracting community should consider identifying members of the workforce who focus primarily on the repeti- tive “labor-hour” type tasks associated with contracting, possibly designating them as purchasing agents or procurement techni- cians. Tat way, if those numbers go down, the Army should either assign more technicians or provide more training. Tis could help alleviate the tension between the dual demands for contracting speed and more data input.
3. Leaders should distinguish tasks as either routine or requiring expertise. Te Financial Times in 2019 ran the article “Law Firms’ Love Affair With the Billable Hour Is Fading,” in which they rated different firms on their ability to get away from the billable-hour model to other methods of pricing (i.e., quantifying) the expert services they provide. Te winner? Te Financial Times found that Accenture’s legal department was able to cut its costs by 70 percent by creating two workflows: the “complex” contract work- flow, handled by senior attorneys, and the “transaction” workflow handled by offshore junior attorneys using automation. While government employees can’t be “offshored,” we should realize that we have some expensive, highly trained employees doing some very repetitive tasks. Tat’s not acquisition on a war footing.
4. All discussion about the workforce is ultimately about resources. Te dollars-and-actions method of allocating resources has seri- ous flaws. It measures the wrong things, fails to measure the right things and doesn’t account for novel situations requiring expertise.
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.
THE SO-WHAT Increasing performance metrics in contracting is a worthwhile goal, but the application of expert abstract knowledge to diag- nose and resolve novel problems is inherently difficult to measure. To change the culture of Army contracting, we should improve the metrics we have, reduce our deference to the flawed ones and facilitate data gathering. Ultimately, however, expertise is what will truly improve outcomes.
For more information, contact the author at
brian.j.burton.mil@
mail.mil.
MAJ. BRIAN J. BURTON is a warranted contracting officer at Army Contracting Command – Rock Island, Illinois. He received his J.D. from the George Washington University Law School in 2014 and is an associate member of the Virginia State Bar. He received a B.A. in philosophy from Arizona State University. He is a member of the Army Acquisition Corps and holds Level III certification in contracting as well as Level I certification in program management.
https://asc.ar my.mil
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