When talking about the government, some people love to talk about cost savings and efficiencies. People in government procurement talk about cost savings and efficiencies occasionally but, much more often, people in government procurement talk about a metric called "cost avoidance," which is not the same thing as

I suppose you can tell a story that the government has made a lot of progress over the past decade or so in terms of acquisition innovation. For example, in the early 2000s, it used to be a bit of a meme that preparing government proposals required three-hole punch-ring binders

A thing that never gets old to me is how much weird stuff the federal government buys. For example, we've talked about Smokey Bear Baseballs and snorkeling-equipment operators in the Virgin Islands. This week, I learned about that time that the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) acquired wildlife-management

Suppose you run a govcon services company and you're trying to grow your book of business. One strategy might be to try to increase revenue with your existing clients by leveraging your knowledge about that client to win more work. Another strategy might be to win contracts with

[Programming Note: I’m back from vacation and, yesterday, I shared more about what I’m doing when I am not writing GovContrActually. Namely, my colleagues and I have started TandemGov, a company that helps organizations navigate government contracting while leveraging their strengths. If you are interested in more fresh

[Programming note: I am on vacation for the next week during the kids' spring break.] Here's a fun trick. Want to get a contracting officer riled up? Tell them that the most important thing they should measure is their Procurement Administrative Lead Time. As a metric, PALT

There's a subreddit called "r/unpopularopinion" that, as you might infer from the name, encourages folks to share their unpopular opinions. A recent example is "A lot of people put so much spice on things they've forgotten how to actually just enjoy food.

One of my very first posts in GovContrActually was an article entitled "Emails to Nowhere". It involved a very sad situation where the government maintained a system called Secure Access File Exchange (SAFE)[1] that automatically and incorrectly populated an email address. As one might expect, a vendor

[Programming Note: Apologies for the slightly delayed post this week. The holiday and some unexpected work threw off my schedule. I'm going to be off next week, but back on a normal calendar the week after!] There's a classic joke, awkwardly told by Alan Turing in

If you ask the internet what the "Rule of Two" is, you will learn something about Star Wars.[1] In the Star Wars Universe, the Rule of Two means that only two Sith Lords can exist at any given time. Apparently, there's always (and only!) a