Page 48 - Federal Computer Week, May/June 2019

TheLectern
‘Show, don’t tell’
takes hold in federal
contracting
The wider use of tech demos could signal a long-needed update to the government’s procurement process
BY STEVE KELMAN
C ontracting source selection has traditionally revolved around the evaluation of detailed proposals produced in response to requests for proposals. Proposal writing was an arcane skill, serving as a barrier to entry for firms new to the government marketplace and taking lots of time and resources for contractors and government evalu-
ators alike.
At the extreme, there were stories
of proposals being delivered to the government by forklift — something that probably occurred only for major weapon systems procurement — but that vividly expressed the excesses of the system. Beyond that, many critics, such as Ralph Nash of the George Washington University Law School, heaped scorn on written proposals as an “essay-writing contest” in which bidders would talk about their skills and what they were going to do, nor- mally without contractually binding commitments.
It has sometimes been suggested, with exaggeration but not completely inaccurately, that the core competence of traditional government contractors
has been proposal writing more than producing good work.
Prototypes and oral presentations
Dating back to the 1980s, there have been a fair number of efforts to reform the system to address those criticisms and produce some version of “show, don’t tell.” Perhaps the first significant example was the use of competitive prototyping in weapon systems acqui- sition, often known as “fly before you buy.” The approach never got a huge amount of traction because of the cost of supporting parallel development of prototypes, which involved so much work that no contractor would do it for free in the hopes of getting a produc- tion contract. Most prototypes today are developed under the Defense Department’s other transaction author- ity, but companies don’t produce com- peting prototypes.
One notable non-DOD example of competitive prototyping from the 1990s was the Federal Aviation Admin- istration’s acquisition for a system to improve communication between air traffic controllers and aircraft. Two prototypes were developed, and they
were tested under real conditions in the air traffic control system, with users judging how well a system worked. (In the IT arena in the late 1980s, the government occasionally demanded “live-test demonstrations” by bidders, where firms had to bring in their gear and show that it worked. Unfortunately, bidders often brought in jury-rigged solutions that had been carefully tuned to work at least once.)
Starting in the 1990s, there were also significant efforts to introduce page limits for proposals, which didn’t tackle the system’s reliance on evaluat- ing written proposals but instead tried to streamline those documents.
Perhaps the most far-reaching effort to reduce the reliance on written pro- posals was the introduction of oral pre- sentations as part of source selection. The idea was that government officials should have a chance to interact with the people who would be leading the work if the company was awarded the contract, including asking ques- tions and grading the responses. That approach would give the government more information about the company’s actual skills, as opposed to what had
48 May/June 2019 FCW.COM