Contractors should be less shy telling government what they think

Source: federalnewsnetwork.com

Tom Temin: Larry, tell us about these incidents when in your words, the government was begging for information from industry.

Larry Allen: Tom, the first incident was a meeting I was in last week where there are a group of contractors on the phone and some people from a federal agency, the people from the federal agency made it very clear at the outset that they weren’t there so much to give information about their procurement, which isn’t even in the draft RFP stage yet. They really wanted input from industry about what they saw in terms of best practices from other contracts, will it be a good way to attract innovative solutions? Even things like what’s a realistic timeline for us to proceed on if we want to add some of these new innovative features to our program? And they got crickets. And I’m listening to the conversation on the phone, and you could tell the government people, Tom, increasingly wanted the input and they weren’t getting it. The contractors were there to get information, not give it. And I thought to myself, this is just the most latest example of a missed opportunity.

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