Michael Fischetti is the Executive Director of the National Contract Management Association.
The need for trained and experienced program professionals is well understood. Those with technical knowledge of agency mission, policy and process, contracting principles, appreciation of market forces, the evolving regulatory environment, supply chain complexities, manufacturing processes, technological advancements, overall business acumen, etc., requires a veritable super hero, whether it’s the contracting officer, program manager, business development director, or others.
In an earlier era of mostly adequate program resources, sufficient expertise within specific specialties (such as item management, requirements determination, property and asset management, market, audit and financial analysis, in-plant ACO and quality responsibilities, engineering, information technology, and other technical disciplines) offered a broad array of diverse expertise, allowing for lower-risk solutions. Today, many of those skills are diminished, gone for good or in a slow and tenuous rebuilding process. This requires those few who remain to wear multiple hats.
Every organization has strengths and weaknesses; core capabilities and skills they must augment from outside. This isn’t unique to contracting, but typical in all endeavors, which become ever more complex. When differentiating successful from unsuccessful programs, it is clear that teamwork and solid communication rank at the top. The ability of various specialties to define and react to challenges and opportunities requires not group-think, but diverse expertise where the sum of collective human capital is greater than any one individual.
More than new policy or regulation from above, this issue of teamwork forms the crux of acquisition challenges today. Increasing staff to execute today’s complex and outsourced government isn’t occurring. In fact, it may decrease further.
Managing the various contracted services that replaced those vanished in-house functions, or performing more effort with fewer resources, in both government and industry, requires those who remain to have multiple technical skills. In addition, they must have an enhanced ability to work within an interdisciplinary team that can differentiate the forest from the trees in deciphering and analyzing all the relevant data in developing and meeting complex program requirements.
Programs managed under traditional management styles or poor communication skills will become victim to a team that won’t tell the emperor he isn’t wearing any clothes. If you can’t get along with others, it’s much harder to get your message heard, no matter how important.
In many organizations, the contracting professional is often (for several reasons) the presumed program manager; expected to be the one professional responsible for all the nontechnical, business aspects of the project, from performance progress to finance. With many agencies or firms not recognizing, managing, or assigning a program lead, the contracting staff is expected to fill the gap.
All the more reason why teaming is critical. Successive acquisition reforms have repeatedly over the years reemphasized this skill and forced it into regulation, guides, best practices, and overall policy. Complementing teaming skills is the ability to form productive, interpersonal, and interdisciplinary relationships, demonstrated written and verbal communication expertise, and the related ability to work well with others. Anything less results in one or more team members “checking out,” permitting those with more authority or persistence to aggressively push individual ideas forward, often to the detriment of the overall program.
If there is a fundamental change in the skill sets of today’s acquisition workforce, it is the need to quickly adapt to constant change (requiring program agility) and a reasonable understanding and appreciation of multiple acquisition disciplines. To support this need, the most important skill beyond technical competence, in today’s ever more dynamic and disruptive programs, is teaming!
Teaming is critical for success in lean times
