Hello and welcome to the contracting officer podcast. You're listening to the podcast for people who want to learn about the government market from a contracting officer's perspective. Today we're going to talk about the government acquisition process using a concept that we call t ime z ones. We'll describe the types of activities that go on in each of the zones and what you and the government should be doing during each phase.
T here a re separate casts that go deeper into the details of each zone. This cast is meant to be an overview of the concept throughout our other p odcast, we refer to t he zones to help you understand where the topic w e're discussing fits in the overall acquisition process. A lright, let's get started. A ll r ight, Kevin. Today we're g oing t o talk about the time zones.
This is the way you and I have referred to the different phases of the acquisition cycle in a way that's more easily relatable. There's four different zones. There's the r equirement zone, the market research zone, the R FP zone, and the source selection zone. And that's in order from the beginning of I want to buy something to the end I've selected, who I want to buy it from. So tell me a little bit about the requirement zone and where it all starts.
In simple terms, this is what is the actual need and the reason we start with a requirement zone is this is something that's happening often before the industry folks or the offers that the potential bidders even know that the requirements being written. If it's a contract that's being renewed, this is probably happening about a year before the contract renews. Or if it's a requirement that the RFPs and it comes out next year or it may be coming out next month. Let me tell you why.
So the simplest way to think it is is it doesn't matter whether the contracting officer is buying a copier or they're buying an aircraft. These four time zones still apply. So in the copier example, if requirement is well were going to need a to copier because this one looks like it's dying. Okay, let's pull out the spec. Let's find out this. How are we going to buy this thing? Do some market research, look on GSA, E-buy, something like that.
Do some market research to see yup, here's a small business that has it or we're going to buy it and staples and you make that decision and they put out a bid or they, depending on how the process goes and they actually just put it on a GSA and pick one as the RFP zone. And then there's a source selection where they say, okay, here are the three bids and we're going to pick one. And they award the contract and off they go. Went through that really fast. Right.
Well that same process applies if you're buying a f 22 fighter, except the requirements process takes a lot longer, a lot more pieces, a lot more players to check with. Market research zone, i t takes a lot longer because now you have to figure out who can actually build this thing, who has the supplies, what manufacturers. You've got all kinds of buyer, American rules. I mean it's a jet, a whole different level.
And at that point you might actually circle back to the requirement zone and refine them cause you've learned a lot during the market research zone, correct?
Exactly. Yeah. And then once you've laid out the market research and that's where you decide, are you doing this as an, and I doubted it as a j et, but you get the example, how i s the acquisition strategy going to work? You're going to put out pre-solicitation notices, all that kind of stuff, and then you're going to have the R FP zone o r the actual RFP goes out.
And remember in the c opy o r example, it may have been a half an hour, I mean they just went on Ebay or E-buy and looked at three different u h, options to pick from. Or they put out an RF, a n RFB and they gave people two days to respond. I mean, there's lots of different ways to do that. Well, on the fighter example, it could be, it could be 30 days, it could be 45 days, could be six months, who knows? But it's a lot longer.
And then of course the source selection zone is after all this is done that you evaluate the proposals and pick one. So you get, these are kind of hyperbole to make the point. T hey're very, very obviously different examples, but the four time zones apply t o essentially for the most part, every acquisition that a contracting officer uses.
Right? So if I'm a small business owner, requirement zone is where I say, Hey, I think I need something to solve a problem market research zone is where I'm tooling around on the Internet and checking all the different sites from Amazon to anything else. Then I move onto the RFP zone where I'm actually comparing the prices or the specs between the, between the different sites that I've narrowed down to as potential sources.
And then the source selection zone is where I actually say, this is what I'm going to buy and hit click.
I say this kind of tongue in cheek. This same process should apply when you're buying your goods, your services, and not everybody uses all these pieces. Sometimes they walk up and go, oh , I like that and buy it. So you noticed they kind of skipped the requirement in the market research zone, but that's just how humans, human nature is what it is. But the government process, these time zones, we use this concept to lay out those four pieces.
So throughout the podcasts you're going to understand podcasts, you're going to understand where are we in the overall process by what zone we're in. And that's why we're talking through this today.
Exactly. And so we'll have a separate cast for each of these zones where we get much more in the details of each zone. But right now we're just going over the top level. How do I know which zone I'm in? So let's, let's jump into the requirements zone and talk a little bit in just a little more detail about what's in the requirements zone. So this is where the government is deciding what they need and why.
This is really where they're writing out the requirement of what they want to buy, their building, the contract requirement to see how can we buy this? What's the acquisition strategy potentially going to be? Does industry know that this is coming up? Uh , how big is the contract going to be? Are we going to buy a thousand or 5,000 of whatever units of whatever product this is. Is this going to be a one year contract or a five year contract? What's the definition of success on the contract?
Let's say that we're buying a helmet mounted recording system. So that's a commercial item. You and I can buy those. However, depending on who you w ant. A nd, and by the way, what that means, h elmet mounted recording system is a small device that goes on a, in this case, a special operations operators helmet. So you literally can see i n HD the stuff that they see.
So like GoPro on steroids.
Exactly. Okay . That's a good example. So that's a real product and they're out there, right? So the requirement would be, well, how light does it have to be? Does it have to be waterproof? Um , how much shock absorbernt does it have to be? How big can it be? How does it fit on the helmet? Can it just be stapled? Stapled? That's a bad example. Can it be glued on there? Does it have to fit on the rails? There's all these different, that's part of the requirement.
Now keep in mind that you lay out, okay, this is what I want it to do. O r you haven't looked necessarily h aven't looked into the market research zone yet to see what can industry do? You're saying, what, what do I need? What is my actual requirement? So we're gonna move into the market research zone now because once you've decided this is what I need. So going back to the helmet mounted recording system, you need an HD system that is light, doesn't throw off.
The weight of the helmet is probably waterproof and is rugged and a shock absorbent . So I make up those requirements right. Now you know that now you do some market research, you put out an RFI, u h, you post something on, on, u h, fed B iz o ps. You go to conferences, you're a requirements folks. IE, your program manager and your users, they probably are looking at the internet or t hey're reading magazines. They know what is commercially available. They know what the art of the possible is.
And you can say, okay, well th ere t h ere c ommercial items for this. There are a couple of s mall businesses that make it. Maybe we could set this aside for a small business and because we want to order 5,000 of them over the next five years, we need to make sure, can a small business actually manufacturer a thousand a year or a thousand a month or whatever your requirement is. So you see how you have to see what can industry actually do.
So when somebody asks me, well, should I respond to an RFI. The answer is if this is something that you are targeting, then yes. Because this is the kind of information that you don't want. The government t o guests d idn't want them to assume, oh yeah. Small businesses can't do that. Well if you can, this is your chance to tell them that you can.
So this market research zone is a key factor c ause they make the decision on everything and make a decision on everything from whether or not it'll be a commercial acquisition contract type, how long the contract will actually be. Uh , how, how important will pass performance be will be relatively more important than price. Will they do a lowest price technically acceptable because this is a commodity that 20 companies can make.
So all of those decisions are influenced during the market research zone.
Right? So we actually use the market research zone to refine the requirements and we're probably going to circle back to the requirements we should've mentioned before. The requirements zone is usually the longest period of time and you might touch it multiple times as you go through the other zones. Because as we've learned in that market research zone, we might find that there's water resistant helmet mounted cameras and there's waterproof helmet mounted cameras.
And we might circle back to the people that are gonna use these things and say, hey, the water resistant ones cost half as much as the waterproof ones. Is Water resistant? Okay. Or do you really need to dunk them? So we're going to touch requirements many times even as we were finding it through the market research zone and as we're going to talk about in a minute with the RFP zone, RFP zone might let us reach back and refine the requirements yet again.
Exactly. And then as the RFP zone really gets into, and now that we've laid out what the requirement is, we've decided what the acquisition strategy will be and what the, what the market can actually do. Now the RFP is posted for everybody to respond to. And from an industry perspective, if you, this is the first time you've heard of the requirement, do you understand all that's been going on in the background because this is why sometimes we'll that requirements written for somebody else.
Is that the accusation? Well, the reality is that the requirement is probably written for somebody who responded to the RFI because if your product does x and the requirement is for a product that does y and there's only three or four companies that, that the product does y as through their manufacturing process, well, you're going to take, it's unfair. That's, because they were in the market research zone , they were engaging.
So that's why it's so important to think about when you see an RFP that drops and it's the first time you've seen it, there's a, there's a story behind that and you have to be very careful that just because you can do it and just because you can respond doesn't make it the best choice for you.
Yeah . At that point, you may be too late to respond to it. If all of your competitors have been active during the market research zone and helping make sure that their product fits into to the requirements, you might be too late to respond. If you're just stepping in at the RFP time phase.
I mean most RFPs have not, most many RFPs have a chance for Q and, a where you can ask questions if you don't understand the requirement or if you need one last shot to convince the contracting officer that maybe they missed something when they were releasing that RFP and writing the requirements, but doesn't really have to have a Q and A and it's off that . By that point it's very likely too late to make a major change if you're , if you're out, you're out by then
That's actually part of the, the value of the RFP zone is that by the time you see something on there, this is a good time for you to make a decision on, wow, this is not something I had ever heard of or it came out very different than differently than I would thought. Therefore I'm, I'm not very competitive for it and it's a really good time to decide to walk away. That's a tangent that , well that's a whole different topic.
So from the RFPs zone of what's happening from a contracting officer's perspective, now you're, you're, you've kind of gone public now all of the questions count. Now there a situation where only the contracting officer is talking to industry. And the reason for that is we've decided this is how we're going to compete this. If we change anything in this process, we have to formally amend the solicitation.
Well if you have company x now talking to the, the user and the, the program managers like they were during the requirements and market research zone, it get messy because now you have, oh we have unfair competition, we have unfair influence. There are agreements that may be going on outside of the RFP. It create real risk for whether or not the contract can be effectively awarded.
So, so the big difference here is now instead of lots of communication back and forth, it's funneled through the contracting officer. That's a big change. And so if you have to issue an RFP amendment, what that means, the offers have already writing their , their proposals. So if you have to issue an amendment, you usually have to extend the time period to to deliver the proposals, the proposal due date.
So it, depending on the, the magnitude of the change, you may have to give another 10 days, another 15 days, another 30 days if you make a major change the RFP, so, so you're really extending the time it takes you to complete the acquisition and adding to the costs that the bitters are expanding in , in responding to it.
And keep in mind. That's why oftentimes you'll see in an RFP that the amount of time you have to ask questions is limited because they don't want you to ask questions two days before the RFP is due. And well number one, it's very unlikely they can shift and shuffle and change the RFP and then amended i n t ime for anybody to make a useful response. So therefore they have to extend it. That's number one.
But number two is even if you got your answer two days before the p roposals due, you may not be able to adjust your course and answer the, the n ew, basically adjust your course based on what that answer may be. So it can be very careful that don't wait until day 25 of the 30 day cycle to actually ask your questions. So in order to offset that contracting o fficer's will often say you have 10 days to answer, ask questions after that.
We may or may not get to them because to be fair, they're trying to get through this process that they're trying to award contracts. They're not in the business of having RFPs drag on for six months or a year if they can help it. So the reality is that they're going to do as much upfront as they can so they can keep that schedule, keep that RFP schedule. Because keep in mind a lot of other things going on in the background.
You've got funding obligations, you've got users who actually want the product or service, you've got contracts expiring. I mean there's a schedule behind all this that the government isn't necessarily going to tell you about.
But you got to hope by the time we get to the RFP zone that you've, you've worked out all the questions and the back and forth during the market research zone and you have very few questions. Uh , by the time you get to the actual RFP zone, that's why, you know, we say the RFP zone doesn't usually bleed into the other phases.
The requirements zone in the market research zone, you might circle back through several times as you're building the requirements better once you get to the RFP zone, except in very rare circumstances, you're pretty much done rewinding to the other zones. All right , we've, we've released the RFP. It's out on the street, proposals come in. So now we've entered the source selection zone .
And the source selection zone is the final stage. This is where you can't go back , uh , that the reason that's important to understand is that an interesting thing, we've talked about the 80 20 rule and government contracts. The 80% of the 80 20 rule in the in government contracts is the process or the source selection zone is okay. The process is now finite. Everything that we laid out there during the first three phases, we can't change anything anymore.
We can't go back and say, Oh yeah, when we meant, we said water resistant, but we really wanted waterproof. You can't do that at this. At this stage. You can't say, well, we wanted a three year contract, but we're going to award a five year contract. You can't do that.
It's like all of those things, and that's again, that's a unique feature of government contracts is that you can't, you can't go back into the RFP zone after you're in source selection, so now you have to award a contract based on what you actually competed.
So this is the scary part for the bidders where you just sit back and bite your nails because proposals go into the black box, the government stops communicating and talking about it at all and you just have to sit back and wait for the award announcement.
It's stressful on both sides because now the, perception on the government side is we , we're just waiting for everybody to protest. Every single thing that I, that I come up with here, every , every, every decision, every assessment, every word in the, in the , it's gonna end up being in the debriefing and the source selection, decision documents and all of those things. It's a very fine process that you have to be very careful that you're sticking to what we said we do.
What, what was the RFP requirement, market research, what did that all sum up to and then what did everybody answer meaning or the proposal and you have to assess what's actually been answered,
Right? So there'll be a whole separate cast where we're going to have to dive into what the heck is the government doing taking so long. This should be an easy decision.
The end of the source selection zone is contract award. We could, in theory if we were cynical, add a fifth one fifth phase called the protest zone, but let's not do that . But in reality, this is the contract award. Best case scenario. This includes debriefings and essentially begins work on the contract and you have a kickoff meeting and , and, and honestly contracting officers then move on to the next acquisition.
Either they they pick up administering this one or oftentimes what happens is they have a source selection that's either running at the same time, it's about to end or they pick up their next one and this , this happens over and over again. But this, these times zones , they don't change. The overall concept doesn't change. It's just going to be unique to each agency, each requirement and each competition.
We have a visual of this on the website so you can see what we're talking about and refer to back to it if you, if you'd like to. The the point is that all acquisitions, whether it's something simple and small and fast, low dollar or whether it's the most complex, high dollar values, the government, high dollar acquisitions, the government has these all go through the same zones.
So once again, time zones are the way that Kevin and I have referred to the different p hases of the acquisition cycle. There's the r equirements zone, the market research zone, the R FPs zone, and the source selection zone. They're separate casts diving deep into the details of each zone, but for now I think we've summed it up well. So thanks Kevin, and we'll talk again soon.
Thanks.