A CALL TO RESTRUCTURE THE

ACQUISITION WORKFORCE
By David J. Litman

FAIR Point of View Series

Opinions and Ideas from Government and Industry
Thought Leaders

July 2009

FEDERAL ACQUISITION INNOVATION

AND REFORM INSTITUTE

www.thefairinstitute.org
 About the FAIR Point of View Series
The FAIR Point of View Series is a forum for thought leaders in government, industry
and non-profit sector to present thought-provoking point of views in order to challenge
conventional thinking and spur dialogue across all parts of the federal acquisition
community.

The ideas presented in this paper are the points of view of the author and do not
represent the official views of FAIR.

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www.thefairinstitute.org.

About the Author

David J. Litman is a member of the Board of Directors at FAIR. He is also a former
Senior Procurement Executive for the U.S. Department of Transportation and former
Chair of the Federal Chief Acquisition Officers’ Council Human Capital Working Group.
Mr. Litman’s full bio can be found at www.thefairinstitute.org.

About FAIR
The Federal Acquisition Innovation and Reform (FAIR) Institute is a nonpartisan,
nonprofit* organization being led by several leaders in acquisition and supply
management. The Board of Directors consists of the leaders in acquisition and supply
management from private industry, government and academia including:

• Raj Sharma, President/CEO of Censeo Consulting Group, President of FAIR and

Co-Chair of the FAIR Board
• Dr. Allan V. Burman, Co-Chair of the FAIR Board, former Administrator of the
Office of Federal Procurement Policy and President of Jefferson Solutions
• David Nelson, former Senior Executive in Procurement with Honda of America
and chair emeritus of the Institute of Supply Management
• David Litman former Senior Procurement Executive for the U.S. Department of
Transportation, and;
• Joseph Sandor, Hoagland-Metzler Professor of Supply Chain Management at
Michigan State University, one of the leading supply chain programs in the world.

*Non-profit status pending.

A Call to Restructure the Acquisition Workforce 1 FAIR Institute. Copyright 2009.

 A CALL TO RESTRUCTURE THE ACQUISITION WORKFORCE

By David J. Litman

The FAIR Institute’s recent report on federal insourcing of jobs – “The Move to
Insourcing – Proceed with Caution” called for a strategic approach to the task of moving
jobs from the private to the public sector. But one of the questions that arises when you
take a strategic approach to Insourcing is what kind of environment are new employees
coming in to. Since acquisition is one of the target fields for insourcing, the question of
the health of the current acquisition environment becomes paramount.

The current acquisition environment

Acquisition generally consists of three phases: 1) pre award during which requirements
are defined and acquisition strategies developed, 2) award during which a requirement is
solicited for and a contract awarded, and 3) post award during which a contractor’s
performance is managed to ensure it is meeting contract requirements and mission
outcomes.

In today’s acquisition environment, the emphasis is almost entirely on phase 2 – the

award phase. Although there are many causes, the dominating reason is the lack of a
properly skilled and properly sized acquisition workforce. Acquisition, which should be a
strategic business process, has instead become a production line environment. The
emphasis is strictly on getting the money out the door and worrying later if the right thing
is being bought. Workforce resources are focused on awarding a contract, and once
that’s done, handing the contract off to a usually ill prepared and uninterested Contracting
Officer’s Technical Representative (COTR); meanwhile the program manager and
contracting officer start to churn out the next contract.

Managers don’t manage. The concept of a “working manager”, who works on his/her
own contracts but rarely has the time to manage, has become the norm. The time
pressures and staffing shortages limit the ability of the acquisition workforce to think
about what they are doing, check if they are doing it right, and go to training to improve
their skills. Resources that used to be devoted to the acquisition workforce have been
diverted to the oversight community. The Inspectors General have become the first line
of oversight; problems that should be caught and corrected or avoided at the agency level
are now caught by the IG’s.

Under the current structure, contracting officers and program managers are stovepiped in
separate professional series with separate certification requirements. COTR’s and the
whole requirements process in general are an afterthought. Many attempts have been
made to establish more of a partnership among the various professions in the acquisition
workforce, from the creation of integrated project teams to co-locating contracting and
program personnel to actually having the contracting officer work for the program
manager. Some of these approaches have achieved modest successes but if you ask any

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program manager or contracting officer today if they are happy with the relationship, the
answer you will probably get is “no”.

This dysfunctional environment makes what should be an attractive job – “the

government’s buyer” as some put it – into a drudgery. The external pressures from
constant, confusing, and sometimes contradictory policy changes, intense scrutiny from
the audit community, and general public distrust of anything related to contracting and
contractors in general create a “no-win” situation for anyone in the acquisition work
force. Achievements, of which there are many, are ignored, and failures are blown out of
proportion to the point where acquisition workers have to begin to wonder if the mission
they signed up for has been pushed aside in the pursuit of process perfection.

A “healthy” acquisition environment

So then what would a healthy acquisition environment look like from a workforce
perspective? Here are some things to consider:

Cross functional partnerships flow out of the culture and dynamics of the
organization rather than being forced by artificial structures.
There is sufficient staff for managers to actually spend time managing and for
junior, less experienced staff to work in tandem with more senior staffers to learn
the ropes of the business, almost like an apprenticeship system.
The environment promotes personal growth. There is sufficient staff to allow
time for learning opportunities both on the job and through formal training.
Experienced personnel may even have the time to provide training to more junior
staff. There are clear career paths and opportunities to try different things.
There is sufficient staff to perform normal in process work reviews as well as
oversight.
Quality management is part of the culture and process. Remember the old
Motorola saying: “The quality goes in before the name goes on.” Every
contracting officer should be able to put his/her name on a contract confident that
it could withstand scrutiny from an external review.

There are many factors that work against a healthy acquisition environment both in the
human resources structure and the surrounding milieu. Many strategies are currently
being proposed to improve recruitment, retention and training of the acquisition
workforce. For example, intern programs are being touted as one of the recruitment
solutions. Yet, spending lots of time and money on developing these super capable
interns and then graduating them into the existing dysfunctional environment, will result
in losing them sooner rather than later.

A Single Acquisition Series

The acquisition community has been tinkering around the edges of the workforce issue
for many years. Fundamental structural changes need to be made to build a viable,

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integrated acquisition workforce. One change that would address many of the issues
outlined above would be to create a single acquisition series.

The acquisition community and policy makers keep talking about the need to emphasize
the “Big ‘A’ – acquisition – rather than focusing on just procurement/contracting issues.
What they are referring to is the need to recognize that the first and third parts of the
acquisition process – defining requirements and managing performance – and the people
who perform those functions are equally as important for the success of an acquisition
outcome as the process of awarding the contract. The first priority should be
strengthening the capabilities of the acquisition workforce in the pre-award and post
award arenas as opposed to the types of contracting process issues currently being
discussed.

But there have been very few concrete suggestions on how to shift that focus to the “Big
‘A’. Part of the problem is that the structure of the system works against the “Big ‘A’
concept. Contract specialists are included in the 1102 series with their own specialized
training and certification programs. Acquisition program managers have no dedicated
series (many are 340’s, which is a catch all series) although they do have their own
unique training and certification requirements. COTR’s are often plucked reluctantly
from the ranks of technical staff and then force fed training mostly on post award
activities to try to teach them enough to monitor contracts. They learn little to nothing
about defining requirements up front. This stovepiping of career paths, training and
activities works against the kind of teamwork that is needed to produce successful
acquisition outcomes.

The government should create a single acquisition series that encompasses at a minimum
three functions: program management, contracting, and a new function called
requirements management (in essence, a professionalized super COTR). Here are some
of the advantages to this approach:

Training and certification could be developed with a multi functional audience in

mind. Certifications could be for acquisition with specializations in contracting,
program management, or requirements management. Contracting people would
have to take at least some program management training and vice versa – in fact,
many training courses could be multifunctional in nature while only some need to
be focused on the specialization. Rotational assignments would be mandatory and
at some point, each person would have to rotate to the other functions to be
certified.
Career paths could be easily identified for each function (where does someone
who wants to be a program manager start today?). Further subspecialties could be
laid out with required training and experience requirements to be certified in those
subspecialties. For example, someone who wanted to get involved in health care
acquisition or IT acquisition could find a specific set of courses and recommended
experiences such as rotations that would allow them to do that.
Creating the specialty of a Requirements Management Specialist would address
many of the issues plaguing acquisition. A dedicated function with appropriate

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 training and experience covering the full life cycle of requirements – from initial
definition to final delivery – would provide emphasis on the importance of this
function that is lacking in the current structure. This position would be for
someone who could translate the users’ and program managers’ need into an
acquisition package and then manage the resulting contract after award. The
certification requirements might not be as stringent as those required for program
managers and contracting officers so these would be ripe positions for technical
staff or people with experience in the private sector. Many of the functions
currently being performed by contractors and which are appropriate for insourcing
are actually requirements management activities. But, in the current structure,
there’s nothing to insource them back into. By defining a new function, the
acquisition workforce can grow where it needs to grow and take a significant
burden off current program managers and contracting officers who are trying to
perform these functions themselves. They could again focus on the types of
strategic acquisition planning and acquisition process quality issues that have
been lost under the crush of work.
This structure would facilitate movement among the different acquisition
functions and/or subspecialties. Acquisition would become a varied career with
many different opportunities making it easier to retain people for a longer time.
The concept of “big ‘A’ acquisition” would be built into the very structure of the
career field. It could be enhanced by mandatory rotational assignments, cross
training, required mentoring and leadership training, and other tools that would
become part of the certification program.

The current job classification structure has straitjacketed the acquisition workforce.
Creating a single acquisition series would match the structure of the workforce to the
nature of the work being performed and help create an acquisition environment which is
built to help the workforce succeed and thrive.

Other elements, such as pay reform and changes to the current classification system and
structures, might be needed to optimize the benefits of creating a single acquisition series.
But it does not require a legislative change and could be accomplished relatively quickly.

Conclusion

Fixing the acquisition workforce is not just a numbers game. The current approach – to
go on a hiring binge, make tactical changes within the current acquisition workforce
structure and tinker with the acquisition process - will leave us all having this same
discussion 10 years from now. Hiring or insourcing more people into the existing
acquisition environment will just perpetuate the problems that inhibit effective
acquisition.

Creating a single acquisition series and restructuring the learning and certification
programs around an integrated acquisition profession that includes requirements
management specialists is a necessary first step to building an acquisition environment
that would be both nurturing and dynamic for the acquisition work force.

A Call to Restructure the Acquisition Workforce 5 FAIR Institute. Copyright 2009.