The Pentagon’s top acquisition leader has an ambitious goal for 2019: to rewrite the department’s list of major procurement system rules known as Section 5000.02.
The goal is to allow program managers and contracting officers to have more “creative compliance” when it comes to developing their contracts to build a speedier, more flexible process, Ellen Lord, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, said in a Dec. 17 media roundtable at the Pentagon.
“We have right now this huge, complicated acquisition process that we encourage our acquisition professionals to tailor to their needs,” she said. “We are going to invert that approach and take a clean sheet of paper and write the absolute bare minimum to be compliant in 5000.02.”
Part of that effort will include rewriting or assessing rules that are unclear or that have become irrelevant, she said. An overhaul of the DoD instruction rules is part of the department’s key initiative to make the process easier for companies in 2019, as well as cut time and minimize cost, Lord added.
As a warm up to the Section 5000.02 rewrite, Lord’s office recently released a handbook detailing other transaction authorities and how they should be used. “We want to describe all of our acquisition authorities very clearly and then the associated contract vehicles that are most appropriately and inappropriately used with those different authorities,” she said. The handbook was posted to the Defense Acquisition University website on Dec. 3, said Air Force Lt. Col. Michael Andrews, Pentagon spokesman.
The department plans to increase its rapid prototyping and fielding efforts in 2019, for projects that can be fielded within five years and still provide lasting capability, Lord said. She anticipates the portfolio to expand from about 10 projects currently underway to about 50 over the next 12 months.
“We’re taking systems that are commercially available and perhaps need a little modification, or defense systems that need a modicum of modification, to make them appropriate for the warfighter,” she said. A detailed rapid prototyping and procurement policy is expected to be released early next year, she added.
The Pentagon is also looking to change the way it evaluates prior performance for contract awards, Lord said. The department is developing “scorecards” that are intended to capture “what we think are all the dimensions of cost performance, quality” and other factors from data provided by all of the services, she said. All of that data would be consolidated into a short document, providing “true insight into the capability of our supply base,” she added.
“What I’m interested in is having comprehensive data that characterizes performance in a meaningful way that will allow us to understand what we are getting for the dollars we are spending, and how timely deliveries are and the quality of performance that we expect,” Lord said.
The goal is for that information to help the Pentagon’s acquisition and contacting community understand current performance, and determine the correct way to structure an incentive fee “focused particularly on where fragility might be within your supply base.”