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software development methodologies
might be helping, but we don’t
“There was no breaking news about the website crashing,” Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said at an event soon after the launch. “It went as planned.”
“It worked because of the agile development process,” added Rob Cook, commissioner of GSA’s Technology Trans- formation Service.
As for the agile BPA, there have been six task orders to date (the contract is only available for 18F customers), with values ranging from $140,000 to $2.5 million. Zvenyach, who is now acting assistant commissioner of the Of ce of Systems Management in GSA’s Federal Acquisition Service, said every one of them has been successful.
The promise of category management
The second area that shows promise is category manage- ment — an initiative launched in 2014 that aims to get lower prices, better terms and better customer service by buying IT commodities “as one government.” Category management is a sort of Release 2.0 of strategic sourcing, which dates back to the 1990s and became White House policy in 2005. The mantra, then as now, was leveraging government’s buying power by obtaining quantity discounts for large volumes. However, a 2012 GAO report concluded that the govern- ment capitalized on only a small portion of its buying power.
The of cials working on category management cite all man- ner of ways that the initiative differs from strategic sourcing. However, by far the most important difference is that OMB has moved to designate speci c “best-in-class” contracts in different commodity areas, and agencies are required to use those contracts unless they receive permission to opt out. Strategic sourcing failed because, for whatever reason, there was only modest agency uptake of strategically sourced vehicles. They built it, but people didn’t come.
This changed dramatically when OMB issued a memo in 2015 announcing new policies for buying workstations. The memo directed agencies to move aggressively to replace open-market purchases and single-agency vehicles with one of three “best in class” laptop and desktop contracts — GSA’s Schedule 70, NASA’s Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procure- ment and the National Institutes of Health IT Acquisition and
Assessment Center’s CIO-CS. The Army’s Computer Hard- ware, Enterprise Software and Solutions contract was added later as a fourth option.
There was a temporary exception through 2017 for agen- cywide contracts with mandatory use, and there was also an opt-out procedure. In addition, OMB’s memo sought to save purchase and administrative costs by announcing that there would be only ve standard workstation con gurations (with functionality dimensions and performance speci ca- tions such as memory), and the content of the con gura- tions would be reviewed and revised annually. The memo stated that all workstations would need to use one of those con gurations unless an opt-out was approved, with a goal that 80 percent of purchases would adhere to one of those ve con gurations.
Lastly, the memo said the government would organize “buy- ing events” twice a year where agencies would commit to speci c purchase volumes, with the aim of gaining further discounts from published prices.
The workstation memo was seen as only an opening shot in introducing category management into other spending categories beyond IT. OMB issued a list of 10 “supercatego- ries” in 2016.
Category management seems to have a decent chance of succeeding, especially compared with the last time the gov- ernment tried to consolidate purchasing in the 1980s, using the GSA schedules. At that time, GSA had a monopoly, which created poorer pricing, and the governance procedure was GSA diktat. But its control collapsed in the early 1990s when other agencies revolted (and reinvention’s decentralization took hold). Today, there are several approved consolidated vehicles, and governance is much more participative.
On at least one dimension, early returns are promising. At the time of the 2015 OMB memo, about one-third of worksta- tion spending went through the three “best in class” vehicles; today, it is about 60 percent — not bad considering ongo- ing agency unease about losing autonomy. A single-award mandatory-use contract for small package delivery yielded savings between 3 percent and 16 percent compared to the most-used previous non-mandatory contract, depending on
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