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Government Leader home > March 2005 issue
March 2005; Vol. 1 No. 1
ACQUISITION: Guard Rescues Contract System
By Richard W. Walker
Coast Guard assembles a team to write contracts for program officers, much like tax preparation service.
The heat is on agency managers to use
performance-based contracting methods.
But there's a lot of resistance to giving up old
ways of contracting and adopting what is still
a new approach.
How do you get contracting and program
officers to step up to the plate and meet the
Office of Management and Budget's performance-
based services acquisition mandates?
One way is to put together a team to write
the contracts for them. It's like providing a
tax preparation or resume service.
That's what procurement leaders at Coast
Guard headquarters in Washington did.
The result: The agency has increased its
performance-based contracts and task
orders from two to more than 300 in just
three years.
At Coast Guard HQ in 2002, performanced-
based services buys were "Greek to
everybody," said Dani Wildason, division
chief for contract plans, procedures and
quality engineering. "People really didn't
quite get it."
"They were resistant," she said. "On the contracting
side, everybody would come back from PBSA classes but not change a thing.
For the technical [program] folks, it was more of a control issue. They were used to telling contractors what to do."
To remedy that, Wildason,
as the office of contract support's
customer advocate,
came up with the idea of assembling a specialized
Customer Advocacy and Assistance
Team of contracting and program experts,
which would deliver services to harried
officials.
It works. The Guard's advocacy team not
only takes the pressure off program and
contracting officers, it does it better and
faster.
"It"s like having your resume prepared,"
Wildason said. "You have all this information,
but you don't know quite how to
put it together. So we write your resume
based on all the input and information
you provide."
The initiative has generated a marked
change in the Coast Guard's contracting
culture.
"The technical people love it," Wildason
said. "And the contracting people have really
come around. They are our biggest
supporters."
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