Gadi Ben-Yehuda The Necessity of Government Digital Service. From across the pond comes this blog post by Carl Haggerty, “Does local government need a local government digital service?” Though the post (as its name implies) focuses squarely on local government, the lessons are applicable to all levels of government, and the answer to the title’sRead… Read more »
ETHICS.GOV LAUNCH. Story here. “The new website fulfills a campaign promise made by President Barack Obama to centralize ethics and lobbying information for voters.” OBAMA AND LOBBYING. Naivete? “So when the Republican National Committee uses those words from Obama 2008 to ding Obama 2012, it has a point. But the administration’s real sin isn’t beingRead… Read more »
Context This article assumes a software development project that is several months into a multi-year endeavor. Using rolling wave you, the project manager, look three to six months out and begin to decompose a significant portion of project scope. As a diligent PM you pull out the GAO Cost Estimating and Assessment Guide and printRead… Read more »
This May the Thrift Savings Plan is launching a new investment option that provides more flexibility for TSP participants. Federal employees and military members will be able to allocate their contributions between a Roth and the traditional plan shortly. The flexibility is in the tax treatment of the employee’s contributions and it may be beneficialRead… Read more »
VA is soliciting Supplier participation in this fiscal year’s SRT Webinar to be held on Monday, March 12 from 1-3 PM EST. The SRT initiative is a part of VA’s broader effort to transform the end-to-end acquisition process which will capitalize on industry expertise as an effort to improve the VA acquisition process as aRead… Read more »
Cloud computing is taking the business and government world by storm. Just like anything else new, it’s uncharted waters and guidelines and best practices are hard to come by. Of course the federal government has the NIST standards and the FedRAMP programs to guide the way on cloud services and acquisitions, but what about stateRead… Read more »
Defense acquisitions sometimes get behind schedule, cost too much, and/or have poor performance. This often comes from using incorrect approaches. Dan Ward, who I actually consider an acquisition prophet of sorts, argues for a different methodology called FIST — Fast, Inexpensive, Simple, Tiny. It calls for rapid acquisition using “80% now is better than 100%Read… Read more »
Slogging my way through the DAU online COR training has generated a question. If we translated all Federal Acquisition Regulations into Farzi and secretly insinuated them into Iranian government policy, wouldn’t that completely halt their ability to procure anything, let alone a nuke, in under 50 years?
As GSA works to establish the “Next Generation” of the Multiple Award Schedule (MAS) program, it is a wonderful opportunity to reinvigorate commercial best practices in the federal market place. As its best, the MAS program provides access to millions of commercial services and products to customer agencies. It is the largest, most successful commercialRead… Read more »
Do you ever yourself in a slump, mired in corporate politics, overwhelmed, or disenchanted? If you ever get in an unproductive state of mind, remind yourself of the five basic principles below. 1. Mind the fundamentals. Especially if we have been doing something over and over again, we grow bored with things. We hit aRead… Read more »