I’ve recently taken on the task of preparing a survey to be circulated across the federal government acquisition community to identify any barriers, challenges, etc. that impact the community at-large. These could be things like meeting continuing training requirements, oversight issues, excessive workload, conducting meaningful market research, keeping your procurements protest-proof, COI issues, and more.
A team from the Acquisition Management Shared Interest Group from the American Council of Technology, Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC) is working on preparing the survey right now. Please share your thoughts below about what is keeping you up at night so we can make sure to capture them in the questions.
Once the survey has been completed, we’ll distribute the findings along with recommendations for how we can address some of the challenges facing our community.
What is your Top 5?? Let’s hear it!
Ben Coit is a Senior Manager at Sapient Government Services and is Chair of the ACT-IAC Acquisition Management Shared Interest Group.
Is the survey targeted for government, industry, or both.
The survey is targeted at the government acquisition community only (not industry). Ron, any thoughts?
A big challenge is going to be the capture of institutional knowledge and the ability for new entrants to reuse that knowledge after the experts have separated from federal employment.
How’s this effort connected to the GSA’s Better Buy Project?
Steve- the goal of the better buy project was to help foster better communication, collaboration and transparency into the acquisition process. The goal of this project is to help shed some light on the areas within the acquisition community that are the most difficult for our current acquisition professionals on a day-to-day basis. A top five list could be lack of access to proper training, “brain drain” within the organization, unclear or confusion processes, oversight challenges, etc. Certainly communications could be an area that could be challenging today’s acquisition professional; however, the goal of the survey not to solve the problem, but to shed light to the community at large on what are the largest, most critical issues facing the group as a whole. I hope that provides some clarity as to how this effort is different than better buy. What are your top 5?