Federal Contracting: Senior Leaders Should Use Leading Companies’ Key Practices to Improve Performance

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Authors
DiNapoli, Timothy J.
Tranquilli, Nathan
Reyes-Turnell, Guisseli
Subjects
Advisors
Date of Issue
2022-05-02
Date
2022-05-02
Publisher
Monterey, California. Naval Postgraduate School
Language
Abstract
Each year, federal agencies spend over $500 billion to buy a wide variety of products and services, ranging from cutting-edge military aircraft to common office supplies. Given the federal funds spent and the missions these contracts support, it is critical that agencies’ procurement leaders manage their organizations effectively. GAO found procurement leaders at six of the federal government’s largest agencies did not consistently use key practices that leading companies use to improve the performance of their procurement organizations. For example, only the procurement leaders at NASA collaborated with end users when developing performance metrics. Corporate procurement leaders told GAO that collaboration with end users during the development and implementation of performance metrics increases coordination and improves performance at the strategic level. Additionally, GAO found procurement leaders at most of the agencies reviewed had ongoing or planned efforts to use performance metrics to measure at least one of the four procurement outcomes identified as important by corporate procurement leaders: (1) cost savings/avoidance, (2) timeliness of deliveries, (3) quality of deliverables, and (4) end-user satisfaction. However, all of the leaders had work to do to fully implement metrics measuring these outcomes. The original GAO report is accessible at www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-491.
Type
Conference Paper
Description
Excerpt from the Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Acquisition Research Symposium
Department
Identifiers
NPS Report Number
SYM-AM-22-069
Sponsors
Funder
Format
Citation
Distribution Statement
Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.
Rights
This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.
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