Shutdowns, endless political campaigns, mixed messages, continuous resource declines, data breaches, more and more technology, more conflicting messages, solutions, never-ending condemnation, and pendulum policy changes, all blended in with snippets of incremental change in procedure and practice. Sound familiar?
What are the takeaways anyone working within today’s acquisition system can pull from the seeming chaos and use to formulate his or her professional or organization business behavior in the near or long term?
What agency, industry, or individual judgments can be made in areas such as future mission success, business or market development, financial planning, risk mitigation, individual career planning and professional development, or organization human capital requirements? What’s going on and how might we tread confidently into the future?
Amid all the noise, nonsense, and change, certain patterns and themes can be derived. Being adaptable, open-minded, positive, innovative, entrepreneurial, and continuously learning will provide the means to weather the many storms, no matter their severity. Enjoy the ride and have fun.
Politics will continue to negatively impact the proper delivery of products and services. To the extent meaningful reform can be defined and actually happen, when laid against the backdrop of elections and an economy under stress, serious objective conversation takes a back seat. Recent security lapses are both a leadership issue and technical concern. Acquisition policy and processes can address the solutions and future prevention, but only if those environmental concerns are addressed.
The loss of experience in acquisition leadership and management will accelerate, offering an opportunity for hard-working, innovative, critical thinkers to move up. However, knowledge and experience in how things work or should work is imperative. Lack of experience and knowledge by those in authority and in the field—offers the largest source of future risk and failure. New training methods that combine technology with human learning motivation seek to bring the workforce up to date in a faster way. Thus, increased experimentation and use of methods such as gaming techniques in courses and events offers collaborative, interactive education, while at the same time producing practical mission outcomes.
The overall decline in federal contracting dollar business hasn’t yet bottomed out, but opportunities for small, veteran and minority/women-owned businesses with ideas, vision, and perseverance and large firms willing to rethink their business models, realign their structures, and approaches and reprioritize their goals will increase. The dynamic cultural changes taking place across society will (or already do) include government programs as well. Competition will become increasingly fierce—with winners and losers determined with more frequency. All organizations must up the quality of their performance and business pursuit in a very uncertain environment, particularly in the professional development of their human resources. What worked before won’t work as well in the future.
The skill sets of the past, while still necessary, must be augmented by several others for the future. In acquisition, traditional individual and organizational skills are even more important and cannot remain “stove-piped” within internal departments. All individuals working in today’s acquisition culture must be multidisciplinary, as the bench strength anyone can afford is less. Among the best skills are communication, interpersonal, project management, contract management, financial, technology, vision, business, and leadership skills. Those with understanding of customer wants—combined with credible knowledge and experience, but adaptable to current conditions—are best postured. There’s no room for talkers; only for doers.
The confluence of political, budgetary, economic, security, financial, technological, and workforce uncertainty today seems unprecedented. Those that succeed, whether in the public or private sectors, will do so based on their knack for understanding the ever-changing landscape and reacting well within it. No one knows for certain what will happen, but these attributes, combined with some haphazard luck, will be determinative.
Michael P. Fischetti is the executive director of the National Contract Management Association.
Overcoming the clutter
