‘We will have their backs:’ GSA pushes culture shift for FAR changes
Gettyimages.com/ Douglas Rissing
By
Nick Wakeman
GSA’s Larry Allen says training and backing up contracting officers are critical for getting the acquisition workforce to embrace new FAR flexibilities.
Larry Allen, the associate administrator for the General Services Administration’s Office of Governmentwide Policy, may not have used the word “culture” when he talked recently about how GSA is pushing for the adoption of changes to Federal Acquisition Regulations, but that was definitely the subtext.
Allen spoke Thursday as part of a Holland & Knight webinar. He was there to give an update on the Revolutionary FAR Overhaul that GSA launched in April.
In the first six months of the effort, GSA and the Office of Management and Budget issued 49 deviations to the FAR as part of what it called phase one. Now the government is deep into phase two, which includes formal rulemaking.
But as GSA officials have said, rules are the easy part but culture is hard.
And culture is exactly what Allen was talking about when he described the initiatives GSA has underway to get the acquisition workforce to embrace the new tools at their fingertips.
Training is a big part of that effort. “We’ve had extensive GSA acquisition policy office hours between the end of July and the middle of January,” he said. “We have had over 5,800 people attend one or more of our training sessions, which I think is tremendous.”
On deck is an all-hands acquisition meeting. “I will be putting on my chief acquisition officer’s hat and exhorting our colleagues to use the changes and the flexibilities we are giving them,” Allen said.
The acquisition workforce is notoriously risk averse, which has made change a challenge. A goal of Allen’s all-hands meeting is to reassure them that doing things differently is OK.
“One of the largest issues with getting the changes fully implemented and operational is a concern that if they embrace these changes and do something new and different, then somehow they're going to get called out for it,” he said. “I want them to know directly from me that that’s not going to happen so long as they are following the flexibilities that we’ve been giving them.”
The acquisition workforce, in other words, has to know and feel that GSA has their back. “That's a really important message to get across, and it's also a message that should not be delivered once. It needs to be delivered consistently,” he said.
Allen acknowledged that it will take time to bring the workforce up to speed and implementation of the FAR changes will not be even across the government or even in the same agency.
So far, GSA is incorporating the deviations into their procurements. And 13 other agencies have as well. He expects procurements from those agencies and GSA to reflect the deviations.
“Where they roll out is really going to be an agency-by-agency process,” he said. “I suspect we’ll see increased adoption moving forward.”
Another tool Allen will be leveraging is recognizing individuals in the acquisition workforce that are embracing the changes.
“They are going to be publicly identified and publicly praise,” he said. “They are going to get the recognition they deserve.”
GSA wants the broader acquisition workforce to see how things should be done. “This is how you will advance your career and get the important projects to work on,” he said. “The message from us could not be clearer on how we expect people to behave and how we expect that people will be recognized and affirmed for doing sound acquisitions.”