Mary Beth Bosco HIGHLIGHTS: • The U.S. federal government announced new Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) rules that set high-level standards for the basic safeguarding of contractor information systems that process, store or transmit federal contract information. • The new FAR rules are effective July 15, 2016, and apply to all contractors except [...]
Courtesy of Jared Serbu- Federal Radio The Defense Department will likely have to make significant changes to a much-anticipated IT services contract known as ENCORE III following a legal decision that upheld challenges by two prospective bidders. The GAO ruled Wednesday that DISA failed to come up with a reasonable basis for [...]
Everyone in the business is wondering, what this election will mean for the progress of proposal activities? Will it cause serious problems, be more like business as usual, or something in the middle? The Political Problem Everyone agrees, the Republic has not seen anything like this election in the 225 years under [...]
By: Statia Marrocco We’ve identified an opportunity for clients to gain visibility with government customers and with other industry partners while supporting a great cause. This summer, three cyclists will ride across the USA to raise funds to improve our youth’s access to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). This initiative, officially [...]
Many of us in the proposal business either haven’t heard about Category Management or are worried about what it will do to the industry. Category Management is a new initiative of GSA / OFPP designed to reform procurement. In a nutshell the idea is to divide many of the products and services [...]
Here is a story that illustrates how much difference a small amount of added evaluation points can make. In 1964 the two top golfers were Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus. Their average scores that year were only a small fraction of a point apart. Yet Palmer made nearly twice as much income [...]
Many of us are in a difficult situation with Alliant 2. We urgently want to win a seat at the table on this flagship contract. And the self-scoring method used for this proposal looks easy. Unfortunately a lot of recent experience shows that the self-scoring approach is deceptively difficult. Minor mistakes could [...]
A review of: Tilar J. Mazzeo, Writing Creative Nonfiction (THE GREAT COURSES: Chantilly, Virginia, 2012), pp. 166. Spending 90 minutes with this book lets a proposal writer move their craft a light year forward. The author has earned the right to address the topic, based on herself writing some captivating nonfiction works [...]
On June 1, the Contracting Office released a Modification of the Pro-Tech Satellite Domain requirement. This was to publish a near final draft RFP incorporating changes from Q&A and to say the final solicitation would be released about June 30. This leaves the other four PRO-TECH domains to follow in the future. [...]
The forthcoming Category Management initiative will likely disrupt the Government IT industry and the government proposal professionals who serve it. Category Management is a new paradigm developed by the GSA / OFPP to make procurement more efficient. An unintended side effect of the shift to Category Management will be a challenge especially to [...]