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home > February, 2007 issue > article
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| We’ve got to get much better at refining our requirements so that once the warfighter tells us, ‘This is what I need,’ we can quickly take that requirement, put it into a contract statement of work and get it under contract. |
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A chat with Shay Assad, director of Defense procurement and acquisition policy
By Dawn S. Onley
Editor
Shay Assad’s Pentagon office is filled with sports memorabilia. The director of Defense procurement and acquisition policy has five signed Super Bowl helmets from the New England Patriots. He has a pair of gloves signed in the 1980s by Muhammad Ali. A die-hard Boston Red Sox fan, Assad owns a 2004 World Series championship bat autographed by the entire team.
Assad’s sports collection denotes a keen eye for personal procurement. Professionally, Assad said he’s most appreciative of his contracting workforce.
“It’s like anything else — great organizations are founded with great people. That’s the key,” Assad said.
Defense Systems editor Dawn S. Onley talked with Assad about the future direction of Defense acquisition and procurement, about the new way the DOD will buy services, and how the department is developing a competency model for its contracting workforce.
DEFENSE SYSTEMS: What does your job entail?
ASSAD: I took over this job in April 2006 for Deidre Lee so I’m very familiar with this particular responsibility. I’m trying to take it in a different direction in the sense that I believe that I have as much responsibility to the workforce as I do to identifying and articulating the department’s acquisition and procurement policies. So I spend a lot of my time these days thinking about the workforce and how to mature it, grow it, nurture it, care for it and also provide [the members of that workforce with] some vision and direction to ensure that they know that what we do for a living is all about people.
The question is how do we continue to develop our leaders? How do we continue to develop our professionals in the world of contracting and procurement? And that’s what I spend a lot of my time on these days.
As you can probably see, I’m a sports fan. Bill Parcells has a saying: “You are what you are.” I think it is very important for us to look in the mirror and understand where we are in terms of what our capability is. I don’t spend a lot of time going through the exercise of ‘Who shot John?’ What I spend a lot of time doing is looking at ‘Where are we?’ and ‘How are we going to improve ourselves?’
My goal this year is to get out to every major command and some of our field commands in a town hall setting and talk to them about what we’re doing with workforce development, where we’re going, how we’re going to go about measuring who we are and what we’re going to need to improve. I want to spend some time just listening to them. It’s very important for leaders to listen to their workforce. So I see my role as 50-50: workforce management, development and policy and procurement, and contracting policy promulgation.
DEFENSE SYSTEMS: How is your office identifying what services the military branches buy? What’s the next step with this?
ASSAD: We spend somewhere between $145 billion and $150 billion a year on services. That’s a lot of money. And we haven’t had a coordinated departmentwide approach for how we want to go about buying those services.
One of my other responsibilities, besides being the DPAP [director], is strategic sourcing for the department. Classically, in a strategic sourcing environment, you want to examine what your customers need, understand the marketplace that will serve what your customers need and then understand how we go about buying that stuff. What we’re doing is looking at that $145 billion to $150 billion worth of services and saying: What is it that we buy? Well, it turns out, a significant amount of money we spend in research development, test and engineering: about $35 billion to $40 billion in that world. We spend another $20 billion or so in program support, $11 billion on logistics and so on. What we’re doing is placing these services that we buy into portfolios. I’m putting them in buckets. This process is sophisticated but simple: Once we’ve identified how we spend our money, we look at ‘Do we have a best practice out there? Is somebody in the workforce using a great tool?’
What we’re going to do is pretty simple: Try to come to a consensus as to what we think is the best practice and drive the organization to use that practice.
This will enable industry to understand how the government is going to buy. So if I’m working for a company, I don’t have to think about six or seven different ways to propose for what is effectively the same requirement. So whether the Army is buying it or the Navy or the Marine Corps or another Defense agency, I can pretty much count on this type of contract structure. The requirement will be defined in this way.
Basically what happens is that each individual program office has its own way of doing things. And that means, even if you’re within one acquisition command, you could have 10 or 15 different program offices, and every one of them is doing it slightly differently.
What we’re going to try to do, and we’ve been talking to the services, is to form a capability that we call a multifunctional support capability, which basically will take a raw requirement from the warfighter who says, ‘I need this type of service.’ This organization will take it, develop the statement of objectives, develop a performance-based statement of work, quality surveillance plan, and, if there’s an incentive associated with the contract, what the incentives will be, then determine who should measure the work output and finally follow through [to ensure] that what we contracted for is being delivered to us. So we’re going to be spending the next year putting that kind of a capability into place.
There’s a lot of discussion about the need for more acquisition reform. I come from the school of thought that says that Congress and folks that preceded me have done a great job of giving us an incredible set of tools to use. We’ve got a lot of different options on how to get the job done. What we need to focus on is execution.
We need to utilize the tools that we’ve got. That’s not to say that there isn’t a specific element of what we do that could be improved through acquisition reform, but in general, we’ve got a great set of tools.
We need to get more disciplined in the use of those tools so that people understand when they’ve got this kind of service, they’re buying this kind of product. And this includes, by the way, working with our brothers and sisters in other agencies such as — the General Services Administration and the Department of Interior.
We’re working very closely with both of those organizations. We’ve developed memorandums of agreement that list very specifically what our expectations are of a particular interagency organization like GSA and also what the agency should expect from us.
What you find out is that this whole process: defining the requirement and then refining the requirement so that someone can understand it in contract form, takes as much time as getting it under contract does. We’ve got to get much better at refining our requirements so that once the warfighter tells us, ‘This is what I need,’ we can quickly take that requirement, put it into a contract statement of work and get it under contract.
DEFENSE SYSTEMS: Lawmakers have long fretted over DOD’s use of Multiple-Award Schedules, some even expressed concerns that DOD officials are misusing these schedules. What are your thoughts? Has the problem been fixed?
ASSAD: I’m not sure that we were misusing them. Examining what was going on, I think it’s knowing how to more effectively use them. These Multiple-Award Schedules are good tools. But what we need to do is ensure that the pricing in a Multiple-Award schedule is competitive, fresh [recently tested] and that our folks realize that that’s really the basis on which they should contract. We’ve come out with some guidance, and we’re working with GSA on it, that looks at how we refresh those schedules, how we make sure that the pricing in those schedules is current and competitive? I think we spend somewhere between $13 billion and $14 billion utilizing the schedules, and that’s a lot of business. What we want to make sure of is that when we’re utilizing those schedules, we’re utilizing them properly. I think we’ve gone a long way toward working with GSA in ensuring that our use of the schedules is more effective, and we’ll be coming out with a lot of training over the next year as we roll out our acquisition and services.
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