Government Acquisitions, A View From The Other Side of The Fence

Roughly a year ago I left an AF Civil Service Acquisition Corps position. I was on the requestor side for a little over 7 years and participated in authoring several Statements of Work, Performance Work Statements, Statements of Objectives, and Instructions to Offerors and Evaluation Criteria. I reviewed several proposals in response to those Request for Proposal documents. I lived on the IT side of the AF Acquisition Corp where we often struggled with “Big Acquisition” requirements for simple IT services.

There was a lot I didn’t understand about the whole process though. I never understood the view from the other side of the fence. Sure, I had plenty of industry partners come to my office to visit and seek information about the acquisitions, but I never understood the value of the data I shared. Of course, there were the limits of what could be shared and when… but that is another conversation. I also didn’t understand the effort behind that proposal I was reading. Whoa, I never knew how much went into writing a proposal that is Compliant, Compelling, Consistent, and Cost Competitive. So now that I live on the side of IT Services and Systems Integrator, my eyes have been opened.

Compliance is not a four letter word, though it may generate many of them. It can be however, a diversion from the true intent of the goals and objectives. Compliance can become that technicality which means you lose the bid. Compliance can become that thing which takes up so much of your discussion that you don’t focus on content. Compliance can be the cause of a proposal outline which just doesn’t seem to make sense or is too wooden to flow. But why should it be? Compliance should be the easiest part of the response! Is my customer really concerned with whether I can build a compliant response or are they really interested if I can describe my approach in a way which clearly shows how I plan to execute the task(s) if selected?

A Compelling response to a government proposal is in the eye of the beholder one might say. Compelling or convincing, persuasive, gripping, fascinating and other such synonyms of the word are a challenging writing style in an unconstrained format. In the format forced on a Compliant response to a government RFP, well that is the proverbial mountain. I have found it so challenging to force compelling into the structures demanded by the response material. It’s the forest and the trees thing that my dad used to always talk about. Enough of the figures of speech.

I didn’t understand the struggle behind getting a consistent response either. On the government side, it never dawned on me that multiple writers put this response together. In fact in many cases a team of writers. And of course there has to be a team, most proposal responses are multi-disciplined and require a multitude of expertise. Additionally there are the response window and page constraints factors.

And Finally, after all that it takes to get the other things even close there is the Cost Competitive side. You have to put together a response which checks all the compliance boxes, was compelling enough to keep you in the running and consistent enough to make sense. Then you have to price requirements which often lack clarity unless you are the incumbent. I am amazed to see those gurus who simply know how to price things.

There has got to be a better way. I would love to see some comments about ideas to improve the IT Services government acquisition process. I know that Mr. Frank Kendall has done a lot of good things to improve the acquisition process for DoD IT. But that focus is on the government execution of the acquisition and not the source selection process. That’s where there is a lot more room for improvement. I have some wild ideas which I will share in a future post.