Federal Contractor Games Part 1: Can an IT contractor be the government's PARTNER ?

There is a school of thought that supports the notion that close “partnering” relationships between Federal IT shops and large experienced IT integrators would yield better, cheaper IT systems quicker.  The proponents point to any number of Federal IT failures and the image and reputations of IT integration companies in support of these notions.  These notions took hold during Clinton-Gore "reinventing government" initiatives.  The idea was to 'downsize' the bureaucracy (smaller government), lessen procurement and contracting 'barriers', and encourage and leverage relationships with the presumably more efficient and effective private sector "big boys' of systems building.

For Federal IT shops and CIOs, it was and is an alluring prospect.  Get these high flying top-tier systems development titans imbedded in the government’s IT shops so that they can ply their corporate resources, management experience, methodologies and current skill base to modernize the agencies’ lagging IT systems. Sounds great huh?

A few years ago, my team and I assisted a Federal organization in evaluating proposals from a group of well recognized, top flight systems engineering-integrator partners who were given access to the executives, managers strategic plans and other internal information.  The idea was to create an open relationship among executives and managers in exchange for decreased contracting burden, fair pricing, expert management, top-of-the-line tools, and expert, experienced IT strategists, engineers, and developers. 

Our job was to evaluate each task proposal for technical, business and cost realism.  In the next few posts, I will report on my observations after evaluating and reporting on almost 300 task proposals over a 2 year period.  Of course there were tasks that were ‘clean’ and carried out successfully, although their costs or schedules often exceeded those proposed, and the functions envisioned not always delivered in full.

There were a half dozen or so categories of partner’s practices that worked against the agency and for the partner.  The one covered in this post is:

Using procedural and administrative steps to confound managers

Procedural and administrative tactics that the partner used included tactics such as omitting required proposal information (e.g staffing plans including qualifications, cost detail breakdown, schedules with dates, or other administrative or contractual components).  This tactic put the burden on the agency to detect the missing components, and to spend the time and effort getting the partner to correct the deficiencies.  This stalling tactic bought the partner both more time to respond to schedules, and caused the agency much more effort to discover and launch correction procedure cycles into effect.  This in turn triggered an all-new submission-examine-accept/reject cycle. This often created schedule problems for the government’s technical and program managers as well as budget-spending problems due to fiscal year spending boundaries and limitations.

This happened too often to be error. After much to-and-fro with the partner, contracts shop, legal team, program managers and the partner, I concluded that it was part of the partner's strategy.

One must not forget that profit-seeking contractors are in the business of making profit.  Secondarily they’re in the business of solving the agency’s problem…. No matter what creative names executives and politicians want to call them. For me, there is no partnership where one party always pays and the other party always gets paid.  The contractor is rarely at risk for anything other than not getting paid as much as the contract's maximums; and the government is always at risk of not getting the things for which it paid. The general public (and politicians) seem to believe that a contractor doesn't get paid until the product is delivered.  That is rarely… if ever… how IT is paid for.

In the next few posts, I’ll expand on these other practices:

Obfuscating rather than clarifying task substance and schedule

Staffing and rate anomalies

Inflating effort for tasks

Transferring and avoiding risk

Manipulating travel and expenses

Overwhelming the government legal and contracting staff

Violating ‘best customer’ pricing guarantees and requirements

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