The LAB's Yearly Digest - FY24

Laying the Foundation

In FY23, we focused on laying the groundwork, establishing The LAB as a trusted partner and a catalyst for change within the Department of Commerce's acquisition community. Please read the FY23 Yearly Digest for greater context, understanding and background, prior to reading this one. For FY24, we took the next step: laying the foundation and starting to frame the structure of innovation. Our efforts have cemented our role and accelerated the department's adoption of innovative procurement practices, moving us from blueprints to foundations.

Raising the Roof: Scaling Innovation

The work of FY24 has laid a strong and resilient foundation for The LAB's future. The Department of Commerce is now better equipped to use innovative acquisition strategies to meet its mission needs. We will continue to build on this momentum, adding new rooms and features to our house of innovation, and strengthening our commitment to our partners and the broader acquisition community. For FY24, The LAB led and significantly contributed to sprint meetings for over two dozen projects. Of those projects, the section below outlines the statistics from the 10 completed procurement projects.

Key Metrics for a Strong Structure

• 10: The Lab’s exceptional coaching and boundless energy resulted in 10 projects being completed and awarded this fiscal year.
• $1.2B: Combined awarded value of all projects.
• $125M/16%: Total cost savings across all projects, not counting awards for IDIQs or BPAs where the award value was unchanged from the solicitation.
• 74: Average time of award in days counting from release of solicitation to award
• 12: Average of innovative procurement techniques used on each project.
• 135: Companies that submitted quotes or proposals in response to these procurements.  
• 12: Average in hours spent by technical evaluation teams in training, and in reviewing, evaluating proposals, and documenting findings for all vendors across all phases of these procurements. 

Key Highlight

The crown jewel of the 10 projects from FY24 was the NIST CHIPS R&D Office (CRDO) Scientific, Engineering and Technical Assistance (SETA) team. Congratulations to that team for their excellent work with such a short runway for a complex and urgent requirement. Here are some notable aspects of their project, focusing on their Goals, Innovations, and Results.

Goals

To hold an open competition using FAR 8.405-3 procedures, GSA MAS, to find excellent companies to support the CRDO to acquire highly complex, programmatically critical SETA services. The requirement had very high-level involvement and interest, and that made it even more critical to get something into place as efficiently as possible. The team was given little time to adequately prepare and plan a coherent approach but still sought an efficient process to increase vendor participation, decrease overall time spent by the team in evaluations, and ensure highly capable vendors. 

Innovations

The team issued an unrestricted RFQ utilizing 12 innovative procurement techniques. The two-phase advisory down-select approach required only a 5-page PDF submission on experience in Phase 1, followed by a Technical Teaming Approach and response to a Representative Call Order (RCO), along with price. The team also used streamlined documentation, confidence ratings, on-the-spot consensus, highest technically rated vendor with a fair and reasonable price (HTRVRP), and rates only price evaluations (ROPE) among several others. A novel approach was to simultaneously award an initial task order using a best value tradeoff while awarding the BPAs only using the HTRVP approach (not a best value tradeoff).

Results

The graphic below speaks for itself. The BPAs and initial task order were awarded 41 days after release of the solicitation. Out of 19 Phase 1 submissions, all 13 vendors took the government’s advice to drop out of the procurement. Only 6 vendors made it to Phase 2, where the government awarded 4, with no protests. The team also provided copies of the evaluation reports to all Phase 2 vendors, so they had their full evaluation documentation. Overall, the program office spent less than 16 hours total in evaluation training, the actual evaluation reviews, and documenting the on-the-spot consensus reports.  

Framing the Walls: External Projects and Partnerships 

External collaboration is always welcome! If you have a question, feedback, or just need a sounding board, then please reach out to [email protected] and we will do our best to get back to you in a timely fashion. Our external stakeholders are important to us, so The Lab continues its weekly collaborations with the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) as part of the PTAI Action Team and has presented as a guest speaker at several other agency and industry events by request. Here’s a list of The LAB’s FY2024 external collaborations:

• Department of Veteran’s Affairs, Strategic Acquisition Innovation Lab (SAIL) as part of their Broadcast interview series
• EPA’s Cutting Edge in Contracting Innovation LAB (CECIL) as part of their video series titled Scenes
• Virtual Acquisition Office (VAO) executive roundtable, and webinar titled Innovate, Disrupt, and Led: The 1102 as a Change Agent
• USAID as part of their Spotlight series
• Professional Service Council’s Federal Acquisition Conference
• Chief Acquisition Officer’s Council forum on how legal and acquisition innovation can work better together 

Finishing Touch – The initial version of the PTAI website was quickly sunsetting in December of 2023. The LAB took all the content, techniques, and additional information and created the PTAI PDF Playbook. The previous version of the PTAI website did not allow dynamic document searching. The PTAI PDF Playbook allows the user to dynamically search for key words throughout all 200+ artifacts that make up the PTAI content library.

Interior Design: The LAB's Core Principles

The LAB rebranded to all caps in FY24, and the acronym now stands for Learn, Assess, & Build. These 3 building blocks represent the continuous journey of learning, assessing, and building in government acquisition and innovation. Each block plays a crucial role in guiding exploration and driving progress. 

The LAB’s Vision, Mission, and Values have all been revised as well – you can visit them here.

Surveying the Workforce

Understanding an organization’s culture and appetite for risk taking that comes with change is important to knowing how best to approach scaling innovation. The LAB uses a workforce survey to determine an organization’s atmosphere for adopting innovative procurement techniques into their work. The prior two surveys were significantly overhauled for FY24, and the new survey was launched as The Innovation & Culture Assessment. You can read the launch of the survey and the entire survey with all its questions here. This survey focused on activities from FY23 only. 

Key Findings:

Organizational Traits

The organizational traits for the entire Bureau and at the Contracting Organization level were enlightening. Both groups aligned, showing the top 5 areas least highly valued and the top 5 areas most highly valued. The top 5 traits that were either much less valued or somewhat less valued were decentralized decision making, innovation and change, employee morale, employee concerns/ideas, and new ideas. Whereas the top 5 traits that were much more valued or somewhat more valued were getting the job done, goal achievement, predictable outcomes, order and structure, and reliability. These least and most highly valued traits are not uncommon and indicate opportunities to change the perception of culture and innovation at the Department.  

Perceived Barriers to Innovation

The top barriers to innovation did shuffle compared to both FY21 and FY22. The top barrier remains in place and has led to The LAB’s focus on outreach and training much more in FY24. The lack of support is much less prevalent, but the fears still abound! It is expected that with more documented successes and provided trainings, the fears will subside. Here’s the list of the top seven barriers across the last several fiscal years:

Finishing Touch – To address some of these perceived barriers, The LAB looked for a training course for the Bureau Innovation Advocates (BIAs) to help prepare them to work within their Bureaus to address them. This led to The LAB sponsoring a training called Influencing Skills, which focused more on the soft skills than the hard skills such as overcoming obstacles, discovering strategies to help build effective relationships, and expanding personal impact with the organization through engaging and dynamic activities. After coordinating with the Senior Bureau Procurement Officials, 19 individuals were chosen to attend. After taking the training, the attendees determined the content would help them achieve their goals with change management and innovation. 

Earning Credentials – Upskilling for the Future

The LAB continues to champion the upskilling of the Department’s acquisition workforce, recognizing that innovation is driven by knowledge and applied skill. Our strategy in FY24 remained focused on two core pillars carried over from FY23: earning innovative micro-credentials and actively promoting and conducting specialized acquisition training. These continuous learning efforts ensure our teams are equipped with the knowledge and tools necessary for future challenges.

Badging

Much of the Department’s acquisition workforce attended foundational acquisition innovation trainings in FY23 (spike of 275 issued in FY23), with the FY24 numbers returning to the FY22 numbers (43 in FY22, 38 in FY24). To support growth and expansion of the badging program, an overhaul and redesign kicked off in FY24 with the goal of reducing the complication of levels, adding a new badge category, and making it possible to grow Coaches by allowing the Coaching Badge to be more attainable. 

The overhaul to the Badging Program will launch in FY25!

Trainings

Simultaneously, we continued to provide wide-ranging training opportunities, aggregating both internal bureau-specific workshops and external federal programs to ensure our teams have access to the latest acquisition innovation techniques. This year, posted to The LAB’s website is The LAB’s List of Innovative Training Courses, which will be updated each fiscal year. These are not only internal training events for Department employees but include available courses promoted by The LAB across the federal government for acquisition innovators. Across the Department, 709 employees took a training course, cumulating in 1,257 continuous learning points. These included internal courses, like NOAA’s Lunch N’ Learn on Confidence Ratings, and external courses like the DHS Procurement Innovation Lab’s (PIL) Boot Camp series. These continuous learning efforts ensure our teams are equipped with the knowledge and tools necessary for future challenges.

Finishing Touch – As part of the Office of Acquisition Management’s Big 'A' Acquisition Conference, The LAB co-hosted a session with the Chief of the Contract Law Division (CLD) titled Acquisition Innovation & Risk w/ CLD where over 500 attendees joined to hear both sides discuss the benefits and risks of innovative procurement techniques. The very next day, the CLD attorneys attended a PIL Boot Camp.  

FY25 Vision – Building Out

Page 11 of the FY23 digest listed goals for FY24. We are happy to say most goals were met, implemented, or undertaken this year. A few remain a work in progress and are now goals for FY25.

Goals for FY25:

• Continue coaching, consulting, and cheerleading acquisition teams throughout the Department and its Bureaus. Maintaining the number of formal completed procurement projects at 10 as the benchmark.
• Launch a social media channel to better engage with industry, internal employees, and acquisition workforce members across the federal government.
• Redesign the badging program, focusing on growing the number of coaching badges.
• Expand the roles of the Bureau Innovation Advocates to be more of an advocate, leading the movement, training opportunities, and start supporting coaching engagements across their Bureau.
• Focus on micro-trainings on The LAB’s YouTube site. For example, 5-minute videos rather than 50 minutes.
• Consider a Rotation Program to mentor, provide hands-on experience, and instill contracting best practices to future Coaches at the Bureaus. The goal would be to return the person back to their Bureau to be an internal catalyst for change.

Thank you for taking the time to catch up on our FY24 activities. Please email [email protected] if you have any questions.