Mini-Guide to Acquisition on GovLoop

These are some of the best articles, groups, and other resources scattered across GovLoop. For your convenience, they are brought together in this single place. Happy reading!

The Queen
Mary Davie. The undisputed ruler of acquisition on GovLoop. Keep an eye on her blog.

Key Groups
Acquisition2.0: The central group for acquisition on GovLoop. Join it and participate in discussion. Expand your knowledge.

Better Buy Project. While this is a group outside GovLoop, this effort grew out of the Acquisition2.0 group on GovLoop, so it’s included here. Plus it’s simply brilliant. Contibute your ideas. Vote for your favorite acquisition improvement ideas. You have 20 votes. Use them wisely.

Notable Blog Posts
Project of the Week – Better Buy Project: An introduction to the reasoning behind and general ideas on how to use the Better Buy Project.

Federal Agency Social Media Policy – examples: Includes Navy and USA.gov examples.

Intriguing Discussions
What’s Wrong with Federal Acquisition: A primer of 4 ideas about areas for improvement in government acquisition. (1) Too many rules slow down the process; (2) high barriers to entry and experimentation; (3) should we make more inclusive the definition of an acquisition workforce?; and (4) the “network perspective”, i.e. how does federal acquisition contribute value to the short and long-term goals of your organization? Andrew Krzmarzick also asks an interesting question: What is right with federal acquisition?

Acquisition vs. Procurement vs. Contracts. These terms are often used interchangeably, but they mean different things to different people (especially between commercial and government sides).

Addressing Bid Protests. Reviewing protests takes a lot of time and money. And it happens way too often. Contractors have little or no incentive to not submit protests. Possible solutions mentioned include: financial penalties and educating customers and vendors. One other not mentioned: a limited number of protests per year or varying on your organization size, e.g. budget or number of employees.

Bridging the Gap Between Those That Have the Solutions and the Government Contracting Process. A link to an article describing a contractor’s experience (particularly learning the language of government) in competing for federal business. However, the real gems come from the comments provided by the readers on this GovLoop post. These comments provide different insights and viewpoints on Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR).

New OMB Guidiance – Will it make a difference? Great analysis by Mary Davies on then-recent acquisition memos to be released in fall 2009. Also, a wonderful comment by Lesa Scott is that the government version of “It takes money to make money” is “It takes money to save money”.

Outside GovLoop
White House Memo: Improving Government Acquisition. July 29, 2009 memo promoting “acquisition savings plans” and “reducing the use of high risk contracting authorities”.

I want to eventually turn this into an Ultimate Guide to Acquisition on GovLoop. What blogs, people, discussions, and blogs do you think I missed? Leave your comments.

Sterling Whitehead maintains a blog called All Things Sterling.