Contracting officers need more help, panelists charge

Contracting professionals and outside groups told a government acquisition panel Tuesday that the main problem with performance-based contracting is that there are too few resources to help contracting officers understand the technique.

"Contracting officers say, 'I wish there were a place I could go to get a simple answer,' " said Barbara Kinosky, a consultant for Centre Consulting, a Vienna-based company that focuses on federal contracting.

She told the services acquisition panel, which was appointed in February by the Office of Management and Budget, that agencies should share more information, including a Web site with online training and sample performance-based work statements.

The panel has been focusing on performance-based contracts, which OMB has strongly encouraged agencies to use. OMB currently requires use of the approach on 40 percent of eligible contracts valued at more than $25,000.

Brian Jones, chief of the Coast Guard's customer advocacy and assistant team, said he realized agency employees needed help writing performance work statements, which specify contract goals and outcomes. Instead of allowing employees scattered throughout the agency to struggle through the statements themselves, his agency formed a team in 2002 that now writes statement for the parts of the agency that need them.

He compared the process to having a lawyer write a will, saying it was best to leave such tasks to the experts. Since forming the team, he says, use of performance-based work statements have shot up; this year, about 180 will go through his office, which works on $700 million worth of contracts annually.

Linda Dearing, chief of the general contracts division at the Coast Guard, said top-down management is needed to encourage employees to accept performance-based contracting. "Until you have that, there will be resistance from contracting officers," she said.

Timothy Malishenko, Boeing corporate vice president of contracts and pricing, urged agencies to involve industry early on in the process, even before the solicitations are written, to ensure that the goals in the performance work statements are reasonable. "We need to have an executable business deal," he said.

Malishenko also warned against mandating performance-based contracts in certain cases or restricting the contracting vehicles available to agencies. He said it is better to let contracting officers have the freedom to choose the most appropriate vehicle for each contract.

In response to panel questions, Dearing said that performance-based contracts aren't always the best choice. If an agency is hiring contractors for a short period to supplement the workforce, but they are not responsible for specific outcomes, then performance-based contracts probably aren't appropriate, she said.