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orey Rindner, the Treasury Department's senior procurement executive, has coined a new term: "reverse contracting." No, all you budget-starved acquisition officers, it's not a scheme to get contractors to foot the bill. Rather, it's an attempt to conceptualize the difference between traditional and performance-based service contracting methods.

Here's how it works. In a traditional front-to-back procurement, you define your requirements, lay out the services to be performed, often in the minutest detail, and then put out the request for proposals for contractor response. The emphasis is on telling the contractor how you want the work to be done, not on the outcome being sought.

For performance-based contracting, Rindner describes a very different process. "Contracting in this case is 'back to front,' " he says, "and you start with the desired end-state." It's the outcome that helps you to define the types of services to acquire as well as the performance standards needed to ensure quality. This approach encourages contractor innovation, focuses all parties on results, and saves money by allowing greater flexibility in how the outcome is produced.

Rindner's message seems to be taking hold, because Treasury as much as any agency in government appears to be pushing the envelope in performance-based service contracting. The Internal Revenue Service is using the technique to get a stronger emphasis on performance and results in its multibillion-dollar business modernization efforts. Other civilian agencies have increased their emphasis on performance-based contracting as well.

Now the Defense Department, with its $50 billion services budget, has hopped on the bandwagon. An April 5 memorandum from Jacques Gansler, undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, said at least "50 percent of service acquisitions, measured both in dollars and actions, [are to] be performance-based by the year 2005." Along with this goal came a requirement for implementation plans by early June and relevant training for the acquisition workforce by April 2001. "What's new about this training is that it's focused on the total team and not just the contracting community," says Air Force Brig. Gen. Frank Anderson, commandant of the Defense Systems Management College.

When Rindner talks of a contracting process in reverse, he's describing not just a shift in emphasis, but a whole new way of doing business. As such, people can't be expected to pick it up on the fly. While the concept sounds relatively simple, "tell the contractor what you want, not how to do the work," it's not until you try to do it that the real questions arise.

Setting up a help desk is an example of the differences that arise when you shift from traditional to performance-based requirements.

Like many people who are semi-dexterous with today's technology, you probably need the comfort of someone on the other end of a telephone line who can explain why that Excel spreadsheet won't let you add another column. You dial a number and hope that someone who can solve your problem in a jiffy will answer. In acquiring these kinds of services traditionally, what factors would you deem important?

These are the answers I usually get:

• Quick response to a call.
• Knowledgeable people.
• Fast resolution of the problem.

Step back for a moment, though, and look at the procurement from Rindner's end-state perspective. Do all of the above answers help to define outcomes you are seeking? They do. Can they all be presented in performance-based terms? Again, the answer is yes, because you can set standards for number of rings by which the phone must be answered and length of time by which the problem must be solved.

But are other outcomes equally or more important than those above? What's the main reason an agency would want to spend money on this external support operation? Presumably, it's to increase productivity. For that to occur, people need to use the system and not pester co-workers to solve their problem.

If productivity is the key objective, then how does that affect the performance measures to be considered-for example, if I put a call in to the help desk to solve my Excel problem, and the response was, in a tone of disgust, "Burman, you asked me that very same question last week, now do you think you can get it this time?"

When I run into that same problem again, am I going to ask my co-worker or call the help desk?

By defining "use" as a key outcome, you suddenly need to include "courtesy" as another key performance standard. Also, you need a surveillance plan to measure how all employees perceive the function, not just those using the system. The same logic can be applied to acquiring food services. You want people to use the cafeteria and not spend two hours out of the office getting their lunches. Again, to measure results against use, you need to survey all employees, not just those using the cafeteria.

These up-front thought processes may take time, but they offer a more effective way to ensure that all aspects of the acquisition support the outcome you are seeking. Performance-based service contracting is one case in which working backward makes a lot of sense.

Allan V. Burman, a former Office of Federal Procurement Policy administrator, is president of Jefferson Solutions in Washington.