[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

It's awkward to say this but, in a normal distribution, half of the population is below average. This is a mathematical fact; but, socially, it's uncomfortable. There's even a cognitive bias—the Lake Wobegon effect—that protects people from confronting this fact; we like

Here's a story. Back in 2002, a couple years after the dotcom bust, the government had a problem: it was spending almost $19 billion on contracts for computer hardware, software, programming, and other related services. But, agencies were struggling to use small-business set asides for IT services. That&

One of the weird risks of running a small government contracting business is that your company can get too big. Suppose you run a company that does work under NAICS code 541512, which means you provide Computer Systems Design Services. Suppose also that you want to stay a small business

Like most large organizations and most people, the government buys things on credit. If someone in the government needs a stapler or whatever, that person can ask a "purchase-card holder" to go out and buy the stapler at the local store and charge it to the purchase card.

Competing for government contracts is an open-book test. In black and white for all to see, the government will tell you what it needs, when it needs it, what you need to do to win, and how you'll be evaluated. Or rather, it's an open-book test