Acquisition Team — An “Overdue” Innovation?

Although in regulations since 1995, coming to an understanding, acceptance and full implementation of creating an acquisition team could be an important, innovative modernization.

These days there is a lot of emphasis on concepts such as thinking and acting innovatively for various reasons and rationales — very often to take advantage of the massive leaps forward, seemingly every day, in information technology. It seems like innovation equals digitizing, and I am a big fan of the efficiency and ease that digital improvements offer in my own professional and personal life.  Since you’re reading this online, I suspect the same is true of you.

In addition, I can’t recall hearing of any government agency that doesn’t tout similar attitudes in support of meeting mission needs, using phrases such as:

• Modernize our IT systems and processes to increase productivity
• Leverage data to inform decision-making
• Use IT capabilities to increase efficiency while improving effectiveness

However, in my years of consulting with an extensive number of government agencies, my colleagues and I have noted way too many instances of agencies’ (and individuals’) refusal to be innovative — or even conform with the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) Guiding Principles (FAR 1.102) — in their acquisition policies, practices and attitudes. What I see being disregarded in so many agencies is the “innovative” concept of the acquisition team, which FAR created in July 1995 as a part of implementing the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994.

I’ve seen agencies ignore virtually everything within the FAR Guiding Principles, especially with respect to the acquisition team formation and role. I contend that without a fully cross-functional, empowered acquisition team as a critical “modernized process,” other IT/systems and data-driven decision modernizations/processes become tragically diluted or entirely undone.

The FAR defines an acquisition team as enabling acquisition success by ensuring all needed functional expertise is available and applies sufficient effort to achieve the mission objectives. Team members must be empowered to make decisions within their area of responsibility and share the FAR vision of timely delivering the best value product/service to the customer — in support of the agency’s mission needs — without breaching the public’s trust and fulfilling public policy objectives.

Empowered team members should come to the team with a full “toolkit” and with responsibility, authority and accountability to decide within their functional discipline — rather than be messengers back to “home base” to bring back new guidance or vetoes of previous decisions the team acted on in good faith.

Multiple reviews and re-dos because team members aren’t empowered to decide may be relatively easy within modernized systems, but they remain inefficient and do NOT advance an acquisition that results in timely, successful fulfillment of the mission objective.

Modern communication tools might enable repetitious, add-on senior-level committee reviews based on dollar value without regard to real applicability, and in-process revised document format mandates, but those do NOT contribute to mission timeliness, public trust, or even public policies that favor streamlining for efficiency AND effectiveness.

Regardless of whether/where you fit within the acquisition process, read FAR 1.102 Statement of guiding principles for the Federal Acquisition System. Does your organization follow these Principles? Does it use “innovative” trusted, empowered acquisition teams to minimize administrative costs, with “… [t]he authority to make decisions and the accountability … delegated to the lowest level within the System, consistent with law“? Do your organization’s practices enable acquisitions that “… [s]atisfy the customer in terms of cost, quality, and timeliness of the delivered product or service“? If not, how can you help your organization get there?

As the Seventh Sense Consulting LLC (SSC) Director of Acquisition Practice, Mr. Patrick Shields has over 45 years of experience as an acquisition/contracting professional and innovative leader. As a Navy Department civilian, he was a major weapons systems contracting officer and manager. Since his civil service retirement, with 2 firms he has provided subject matter expertise support to numerous Federal civilian and DoD organizations, including acquisition strategy/ documentation support for key acquisitions, policy development, and personnel training. He also managed a subscription “ask the expert” response team and authored numerous topical publications for over 25,000 professional employees of subscribing agencies.

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