The dominant first year theme of the new Administration has been the importance of achieving “transparency” to build citizen trust. The transparency ideal—inarguable in principle—is difficult in execution. To this end, most of the available leadership bandwidth has been consumed by public promotion of a data centric portal strategy as a means to achieve transparency.Read… Read more »
Very few people really understand the complexities of government contracting, so perhaps it’s no surprise that President Obama dodged a very specific question Thursday morning about the Small Business Administration’s 8(a) Business Development Program. As The Eye has reported before, the program is designed to ensure that minority-owned small businesses — especially Native American-owned shopsRead… Read more »
From The Acquisition Corner Recent reporting by Federal Computer Week (FCW) highlights an issue that is not being addressed by acquisition reform initiatives; reforming the contract protest process. Writing in the Editor’s Notebook blog at Washington Technology, Nick Wakeman discusses the protest by Unisys and General Dynamics of TSA’s contract award to Computer Sciences CorpRead… Read more »
In August, the Commission on Wartime Contracting gave the Defense Contract Management Agency and the Defense Contract Audit Agency sixty days to try to “harmonize their own approaches” to contract management in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since then a “divergence in contractor-employee counts” has come to light, along with some confusion about who is overseeing theRead… Read more »
I am subscribed to the Monday Morning Memos by Alan Weiss – he is considered “the consultants’ consultant.” I like him because he is incredibly insightful, and also has quite a zest for life. His point in today’s Monday memo resonated with me so much that I wanted to share it with you. It isRead… Read more »
Students of leadership may recall a clever quotation from George S. Patton: No one is thinking if everyone is thinking alike. Although disagreements in the workplace can sometimes create emotionally charged situations, thoughtful disagreement can be quite constructive when managed appropriately. Many leaders have found success by not trying to prevent disagreement but rather byRead… Read more »
Linda Washington, LFCC Chairperson, was interviewed on The Federal Drive with anchors Tom Temin and Jane Norris. The Federal Drive is the morning drive show on Federal News Radio heard throughout the entire Washington Metro region at 1500 AM and in Frederick at 820 AM. Federal News Radio covers both the Federal Government and thoseRead… Read more »
More than 131,000 progress reports on stimulus funding will be posted Friday on Recovery.gov, the government’s stimulus-tracking Web site. Much of the data will include corrections to the first version of reports filed by fund recipients earlier this month. Several early reports overstated the number of jobs created or saved through the stimulus program, accordingRead… Read more »
The very worst time to write an executive summary is when the person finally gets a free hour or two right before or right after the last review. When this happens, there are simply not enough review cycles to perfect this key part of the proposal. I still hear a debate on when an executiveRead… Read more »
From The Acquisition Corner There has been some discussion recently on a case study of shortening the procurement cycle from the lessons learned of the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle. The MRAP is an armored all-terrain vehicle whose purchase and desire for rapid deployment was motivated by the continuing deaths of troops in IraqRead… Read more »