Relationships Count

ometimes the most important procurement reforms are the ones that happen not in laws or regulations, but in people's minds. Throughout its history, Census Bureau officials so distrusted contractors that they rarely outsourced any work. In 1990, the only major work they sought from a contractor was the installation of new computer systems. All other work was done in-house. In the rare instances when Census did outsource, bureau officials and contractors regularly faced off in bid protests and in finger-pointing over who was responsible for frequent contract failures. Not surprisingly, Census officials preferred not to outsource work. But for the 2000 census, 25-year bureau veteran Michael Longini decided the bureau couldn't do all the work on its own and do it well, particularly on the technology side of operations. Capturing data from census forms, providing telephone assistance to citizens, installing and maintaining temporary computer networks and developing an Internet system for disseminating census information all could be performed better by outsiders, Longini and other officials concluded. It was time to change the mind-set that contractors and the bureau didn't mix. "The census comes hard, comes fast and comes once," says Longini, chief of the bureau's Decennial Systems and Contracts Management Office. The decennial census is the federal government's largest peacetime effort, requiring the establishment of more than 500 temporary offices and the hiring of 800,000 temporary employees. By law, the Census Bureau has until April 1 of each year ending in zero to count every person in the country and until Dec. 31 of the same year to report the results for reapportioning Congress. The census helps decide how billions of federal dollars are allotted to states and communities. There's no time for agency-contractor fights. The work needs to get done right the first time. The bureau needed someone with the right attitude toward contracting, someone who believed that close relationships with contractors could reduce the risk of failure. So in 1996, Longini and his deputy chief, Ed Wagner, tapped Michael Palensky, a rising procurement star at the Commerce Department, the Census Bureau's parent department, to bring a new view of outsourcing to the bureau. "People like Palensky . . . are really the models for the acquisition workforce of the future," says Robert Welch, who served as a judge for the Business Solutions in the Public Interest Awards and oversaw Census contracting as the Commerce Department's procurement executive until 1999. He is now vice president for government operations at Acquisition Solutions Inc., a Chantilly, Va., consulting firm. The census contracting team realized they were embarking on the largest procurement effort in the bureau's history. Along with the Census Promotions Office, which was handling an advertising contract, the Decennial Systems Office was preparing to do $1 billion in business. The office established groups of representatives from throughout the bureau to identify all the requirements for the major contracts. Longini's team then sought the contracting advice of outside procurement experts. The experts, including former Office of Federal Procurement Policy chief Allan Burman, helped Longini's team think through some contracting strategies. The bureau also hired Fairfax, Va.-based PEC Solutions, a technology firm, to help conduct the acquisitions, establish standard operating procedures, develop program management tools, review contract performance and conduct financial analyses. Even getting outside help to set up and run the contracts met with resistance from Commerce and Census officials, but Longini's team knew it had to be done. "The Census Bureau is kind of a backwater place for six or seven years each decade and then all of a sudden it has to emerge and become a state-of-the-art acquisition shop," says Welch. "The bureau essentially said, 'We've got to look outside and get professional contracting help.'" With that help, the Census Bureau team held vendor conferences, issued draft requests for proposals and responded to industry questions, both to help industry understand the bureau's needs and to help the bureau understand what was available in the market. The bureau asked each bidder for the data capture systems to prepare prototypes showing how their systems could recognize characters on census forms as accurately as possible. Five key contracts were awarded. Lockheed Martin won the contract to set up the computer systems that would process census forms. TRW won the job of processing the forms. EDS inked a deal to run the telephone assistance program (and was also a subcontractor for Lockheed). Unisys would install, maintain and uninstall computer systems at the 500 temporary census offices nationwide. And IBM was tapped to run American FactFinder, the Census Bureau's Internet-based information system (factfinder.census.gov). Despite the bureau's contentious history with contracts, no protests were filed. As the contracts got under way, Palensky and the others made sure everyone was in close communication. The bureau's contracting specialists and program managers worked side by side, rather than in different offices. Bureau and industry teams communicated every day, constantly checking progress based on predetermined performance measures-including required levels of cooperation between contractors and the bureau. While bureau officials and contractors held standard monthly performance evaluation meetings, they also sat in on each other's internal meetings. Bureau officials attended prime contractor meetings with subcontractors. Julie Dunlap, director of information change management systems for Lockheed Martin, says the bureau balanced the need to make sure contract requirements were met with the desire to foster open communication to prevent surprise setbacks. "The key discriminator for the Census Bureau was how they conducted the contract after it was awarded," Dunlap says. "We always felt that we were working with the customer, the objectives were clear and we didn't have to worry about giving them insights into challenges or risks because they understood the issues we were facing." Dunlap says that Lockheed had no internal, closed-off meetings to prepare for briefings with the Census Bureau. "We weren't trying to shelter any information from the bureau . . . . I hear the word partnership often; I would challenge whether there is any example of the kind of partnering that can exist like [the census contract]." The bureau even managed to foster an open working relationship between the Lockheed Martin/EDS team and TRW, even though the companies bid against each other for various parts of the contract. "Everyone was focused on the same mission. Everyone had shared problems, the same timelines, the same goals," says Hank Beebe, TRW's program manager for census data capture. "There was no time to fool around. The one thing about the census is that the schedule is in the Constitution. You would have to amend the Constitution to let a schedule slip." Census officials who had been leery of outsourcing began to come around as they saw the contract performance data roll in. In 1990, when the Census Bureau handled telephone support itself, less than 50 percent of callers got through. In 2000, EDS handled 98 percent of the calls that came in, answering 90 percent of calls within the first 20 seconds. The Lockheed/EDS/TRW data capture program scanned in responses accurately 99 percent of the time, reducing the need for costly manual data entry. And Unisys successfully installed 10,000 pieces of technology hardware in 520 local census offices in 90 days, kept the nationwide network up 99.5 percent of the time, and uninstalled all the hardware in 90 days. The contractors came in, did the work, and now are gone. Only IBM, which manages American FactFinder, remains. That contract runs through 2006. Bureau and contractor officials say there were some rough spots. Glitches arose, and sometimes the bureau had to reduce performance scores and fees or order contractors to take actions. Bureau officials also had to deal with the intense political pressures that surrounded the 2000 census, both from the Clinton administration and Congress. But the overall performance of the contractors convinced Census Bureau officials that in future censuses, even more work might be entrusted to contractors. Contractors, too, are looking forward to working with the bureau again. "It's the best relationship I've ever had with a government client, bar none," TRW's Beebe says. "And since we're all done, I don't get anything extra for saying that."