Tips from Government on Improving the Acquisition Lifecycle

This morning, Red Team’s President, Jeff Shen, participated in a panel discussion at ACT-IAC’s NexUS Forum: Inspiring A Shared Vision. The event featured government and industry leaders engaging and speaking to effective ways to inspire a shared vision as driven professionals. During the event, Jeff had an insightful discussion with Michael Skorny from GSA FEDSIM and David Rupert from the Department of Veterans Affairs on how government and industry can improve communication during the acquisition lifecycle. Below are Jeff’s two takeaways.

Tips on Improving the Acquisition Lifecycle

1. Industry needs to do a better job of building relationships with federal agency teams and not just individuals competing contracts. People in government move just as often as industry and unless you have connections with multiple individuals, you face the risk of losing those relationships as they move.

2. Government should encourage industry to offer ideas and suggestions during the RFI process. In addition to requesting capabilities and experience from companies, contracting officers should include an open-ended question that allows companies to offer suggestions on the requirements, evaluation criteria, or anything that would be meaningful for the agency to consider before they compete the contract.

These are encouraging words on how government and industry can work together to improve communication. Last year, Jeff shared his insights on how we can improve this relationship even more. In his two-part series, Jeff proposed a few different, simple, and effective ways the government could make changes in order to receive more consistent proposals from bidders. Jeff also addressed one of the biggest challenges that takes place in government source selections – the evaluation and subjective tradeoff decisions on price.