Contracting U.
BY MICHAEL E. WOOTEN
Over the last half century, the federal procurement enterprise has been the principal driver of the education and training standards for the U.S. acquisition workforce. The government also has played a large role in the training of contract professionals on both sides of the buyer-seller equation. It is, after all, the world’s largest buying organization with annual purchases of nearly $650 billion in supplies, equipment, and services to support national security and defense concerns, energy and transportation needs, myriad social services and economic endeavors, and more.
The ability to recruit the right contracting personnel and train them to operate an effective acquisition system enhances the nation’s ability to make the most prudent purchases of everything that the government might consume. Equally important are the sellers who provide the goods and services that the government needs. Good contracting is critically important for good government and an efficient U.S. economy. Both rely significantly on federal procurement.
Today’s acquisition workforce leaders understand that good contracting writ large requires a mature contracting profession and mature contracting organizations. How do we educate the contracting workforce to thrive in a mature profession?
The Profession Today
Contracting professionals serve as risk managers, business advisors, and play a key role in supply chain management.
To manage risks, they advise internal clients on appropriate contracting methods such as the formal sealed bidding process or the more iterative negotiated procurement process. They also discuss the type of contract needed with both their internal clients and their prospective counterparts in the procurement transaction.
As business advisors, contracting professionals must consider and manage a set of risks that includes schedule slippage, cost overruns, poor quality, or poor service delivery. They are integral to the supply chain management process and help their organizations develop appropriate strategies for acquiring goods and services under contract.
The acquisition process provides critical mission support for organizations. It also provides a framework for understanding what contracting personnel do, including creating and managing incentives to ensure that supply and service contracts meet cost, schedule, and performance expectations.
The Process-Driven Framework
As evidenced by the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), Defense Acquisition University (DAU) courses, National Contract Management Association (NCMA) training materials, and various competency models, contracting employees generally organize the body of knowledge of their profession under a process framework. Typically, these frameworks involve planning, solicitation, evaluation, award, and post-award activities. Our profession is process driven, and that shapes the way we think about our professional competencies.
In 1990, Congress passed the Defense Acquisition Workforce Improvement Act (DAWIA). Congress felt the federal contracting corps was being outclassed by its counterparts in the private sector. DAWIA created progressive standards of education, training, and experience for both military and civilian members of the defense acquisition workforce by establishing three certification levels for each acquisition discipline.
The three levels of DAWIA certification mirrored the track for blue collar professions – apprentice, journeyman, master. For contract management, DAWIA implemented a significant education standard by requiring a bachelor’s degree or 24 semester hours of business-related courses. For each level, DAWIA required contracting employees to complete courses, provided by the DAU, and it set minimum experience requirements.
For the next 30 years, the DAWIA framework would provide adequate preparation for contract professionals as process workers. The framework’s education requirements have been shown to support the competencies necessary in the Department of Defense.
In my 2013 study of 9,506 contracting officials, those without the bachelor’s degree reported lower competency levels than their degreed peers, and their supervisors agreed. Those with bachelor’s degrees, regardless of discipline, and with graduate degrees in non-business disciplines, reported no statistically significant difference in competency levels. Again, their supervisors agreed. However, their colleagues with the Master of Business Administration (MBA) degrees reported higher competency levels. Again, their supervisors agreed.
Subject Matter Experts
Notwithstanding a body of knowledge that is organized to follow the contracting process, contracting staff must master a vast regulatory environment. They must also follow the rules established in a variety of controlling sources, including statutes, regulations, case law, agency policies, and company policies. Under the resulting environment of stringent regulatory control, members of the contracting workforce are expected to be knowledgeable about a plethora of federal guidelines and the contract clauses that assert the federal government’s unique contractual privileges as a sovereign entity. They also must be familiar with a set of sophisticated contract types peculiar to the federal government.
Contracting professionals working in the U.S. government must understand peculiar federal accounting conventions. In federal, state, local government, and commercial practice, they must adapt to constantly changing data systems. Within the practice of contracting, the professional must be able to navigate an overly complex regulatory environment, a special cost accounting system, and data systems that “frankenstitch” legacy systems to emerging cloud solutions.
Within these pervasive constraints, contracting professionals are charged with achieving high contractor performance at low costs. Miraculously, some acquire these abilities. Some teach themselves to extract value while managing the trifecta of federal constraints – regulatory complexity, peculiar accounting, and cumbersome data systems. Some find good mentors to teach them what they need to know. Some land in high-performing organizations, and some enter the profession with the strong start of a good and relevant education.
Blend of Characteristics
The general academic knowledge that contracting personnel acquire from their bachelor’s degrees alone does not create subject matter expertise in contract management (Krieger, 2007; Nash & Edwards, 2010). For the contracting community, the claim to unique professional expertise presently relies on a special blend of characteristics—degree attainment, business course emphasis, training courses related to contract management, and process-oriented thinking—acquired through the journeyman experience.
This claim to unique contracting professional expertise supports the purposes of professionalization – to gain the public trust and garner legitimacy for the career field. However, does that special blend create nimble, mission-focused contracting experts who sufficiently understand how to fashion the most complex contracts for the government within the rules as written?
Maturing the Profession
How should acquisition leaders work with colleges and universities to prepare the next generation of contracting professionals? Acquisition leaders must create a common model for the mature contracting profession. The Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP), NCMA, the Procurement Roundtable, DAU, and the Air Force are among those groups leading professional change.
Their leaders are discussing various frameworks that align to the contract management maturity model or at least are considering its implications. These leaders emphasize critical thinking over rote process thinking while considering the need for sound procedures. They emphasize leadership and understanding of business and economic principles over mastery of the strict rules of the FAR. They emphasize mission-focus over compliance-focus, and they place empowerment ahead of the fear of getting dinged.
However, to prepare the next generation, acquisition leaders also must work with colleges and universities to shape curriculum that educates future professionals to think critically. They must engage colleges to teach leadership, business, and economic principles. Colleges must use project management tools and other strategies that focus on accomplishing the mission, and take initia-tive when empowered to do so.
Advancing With Academics
As contracting leaders cooperate to advance the maturity of the contracting profession, they should consider the value of an aca-demic discipline in contracting. Acquisition leaders must articulate the role that academics should play in shaping the unique thinking required of the profession. And not just shaping the body of knowledge, but the unique professional judgment that the contracting community must apply while using the body of knowledge to solve problems peculiar to our discipline.
As acquisition leaders engage in this dialogue, they also should present academic institutions with the full value proposition of the contracting profession – its significant impact on government mission, private-sector objectives, and the overall economy.
Today, few institutions provide superior procurement degrees demanding critical thinking steeped in the context of major sys-tems acquisitions problems. The George Washington University’s Master of Procurement Law, the Judge Advocate General’s law school on the University of Virginia’s campus, and the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) offer exemplar degree programs in pro-curement. The two law programs, however, are specifically for lawyers and NPS generally limits admission to certain DoD employees.
Hundreds of colleges and universities deliver MBA programs. Most ensure that students are immersed in many of the concepts previously noted: leadership, business and economic principles, project management tools, mission-focused strategies, and empowerment.
Notwithstanding the clearly established benefits of the standard MBA, an MBA with a procurement emphasis could be attractive to universities that engage significant populations of students pursuing careers at major military installations, large federal agencies, large corporations, or some combination of those.
University neighbors of large corporations or installations could benefit from enrolling students who are on track to make big money and big decisions. These neighboring universities also stand to benefit from opportunities to partner with government and corporate giants by creating laboratories to improve performance. Examples include the Procurement Innovation Lab at the Department of Homeland Security. Other examples are the tabletop exercises conducted at Arizona State University for acquisition professionals and emergency responders to collaborate on sourcing strategies for emergency supplies and equipment during the pandemic and other disasters.
Through partnering and critical thinking to solve real-world problems in context, universities can position themselves as thought leaders in an unfolding academic discipline.
Fostering Acquisition Excellence
There are precious few opportunities to foster acquisition scholarship in context. Both the Federal Acquisition Institute (FAI) and DAU have responsibilities to sponsor acquisition research. Collectively, NPS, the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT), and the Senior Service College Fellows program produce several dozen acquisition research papers in the form of graduate theses. However, the opportunities to participate in this research are limited principally to DoD employees. Due to time constraints, only a portion of these papers address the most meaningful acquisition questions. A paper devoted to pure research is rare.
The most reliable streams of serious research in contracting or acquisition are generated by the Congressional Research Ser-vice, a few federally funded research and development centers, and a handful of academic institutions.
In its mature state, the contracting career field must leverage the critical thinking – in context – that is unique to the contracting discipline and shapes professional judgment in the practice of contracting. As acquisition leaders engage colleges and universities to pursue procurement-focused research, they must increase the number of fora for academic presentations of pure and applied research specific to acquisition and contract management.
These partnerships should examine questions concerning comparative systems across nations, cost and price models and policies, procurement policy analysis, acquisition workforce competencies and performance, best practices from government and commercial procurement, and adaptation of commercial practices to government organizations.
Acquisition leaders and colleges and universities should collaborate constantly in shaping the standards for the career field. They should improve practice so that the world’s largest buying organization is seen as added value because it delivers the correct solutions fastest, not as a dead weight, tax burden because it is cumbersome. CM
Dr. Michael E. Wooten, Ed.D, is the former U.S. administrator for federal procurement policy. He is an NCMA director and member of the Procurement Round Table.
ENDNOTES
Sofield, M. (2009). The Attorney/Contract Manager: The Intersection of Two Professions. Journal of Contract Management,7(1) 41-50.
Department of Defense (DoD). (2003). DAWIA Certification Standards Checklist: Contracting. FY’2000 Certification Standards – October 1, 1999, Fort Belvoir, VA: Defense Acquisition University Press; and Layton, E. (2007). The Defense Acquisition University: training professionals for the acquisition workforce 1992-2003. Fort Belvoir, VA: Defense Acquisition University Press.
10 USC Chapter 87 – Defense Acquisition Workforce (as amended 01/07/2011), https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCODE-2011-title10/USCODE-2011-title10-subtitleA-partII-chap87.
10 USC Chapter 87, 2011; DoD, 2003.
Wooten, M. (2013). A study in the professionalization of civilian contract managers in the Department of Defense: the relationship between educational attainment and job proficiency. (Doctoral Dissertation), https://www.publicspendforum.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Wooten-Dissertation.pdf.
Hearn, E. (2002). Federal Acquisition and Contract Management. Los Altos, CA: Hearn and Associates.
Krieger, J. (2007). Professionalism in the acquisition workforce: have we gone too far? Defense Acquisition Review Journal, 14(2), 317-333; Nash, R. & Edwards, V. (2011). Training the acquisition workforce: is it effective? Nash & Cibinic Report. New York: Thomson Reuters.
Nilsson, S. (2007). From higher education to professional practice: a comparative study of physicians’ and engineers’ learning and competence use. Unpublished Dissertation. Linkopings University; Jones, W. (1999). Arming the eagle: a history of U.S. weapons acquisition since 1775, Fort Belvoir, VA: Defense Systems Management College Press; Layton, E. (2007).