Invest in People and Infrastructure: Practical Tips for Teams and Longer-Term Recommendations to Change the Culture of Procurement in Digital Service Delivery (Shelby Switzer)

We need to invest in procurement expertise as a core part of a digital service delivery team, as well as infrastructure to support better procurement. Luckily, there are practical steps that teams can take now to change how they think about and implement procurement and acquisition during a project lifecycle.

• Include procurement at the table during program goal setting. Procurement needs to be on the same page as the program’s objectives, so that they can shape the contract around those specific and measurable objectives. This is also an opportunity to make sure the procurement specialist understands your team’s values, existing skill sets, and work environment, which might inform their recommendations for contract scope as well as help you advocate for inclusion of principles such as agile delivery or open source creation.
• Spend time creatively solutioning and researching without assuming a new contract is necessary. Are there SaaS products out there that can solve your problem and help you reach your objectives? Are there open source solutions that solve your problem, which might change your procurement needs to a hosting solution for that open source tool, instead of an entire product build? Lean on resources like Airtable, Zapier, and IfThisThenThat (IFTTT) to help you in your process.
• Don’t assume you have to go this alone. Call your counterparts in other cities, counties, or states/territories and ask what their experiences have been with this problem and how they solved for it. Check open platforms such as CoProcure for joint procurement opportunities, or reach out to communities of practice such as the Intergovernmental Software Collaborative for help finding collaborative solutions.
• If a new procurement is necessary, create a design challenge to vet the capabilities and work practices of vendors. Don’t let vendors tell you what they can do: make them show you. As part of an RFP response, require that a vendor submit code for a prototype that solves a specific, well-scoped problem in the problem space of the contract. The prototype should show that the vendor can engage in user research and human-centered design, and that they follow best practices for a modern software development lifecycle.

Beyond these hands-on recommendations to start improving how you do procurement now, there are broader systemic and cultural challenges that need to be addressed if we are to make serious change.

The first is talent. In order to most effectively implement the recommendations above, your program team needs some amount of technical expertise. That role could be filled by a technically-minded product owner, a solutions architect, or software developer. This staff would create and vet responses to a design challenge, as well as implement other common recommendations for improved procurement such as modular contracting for a technical project. While governments are increasingly hiring for technologists, it’s unfortunately still not the norm.

There is also a lack of procurement talent, especially those trained in digital fundamentals. The pipeline into procurement is small and the initial training long. A typical certification process takes 3-4 years, and training for tech-focused skills such as DITAP are an additional time investment. We need to expand the pipeline through programs at the university level as well as clear, supported career-pivot pathways for technologists or other professionals to transition into procurement roles. We should also invest in upleveling the people already in the field, through more programs like DITAP and OCP’s Lift program. Likewise, we can support existing procurement professionals by training product / digital service teams in procurement basics, so that as procurement, technologists, and program folks start working more closely together, the entire team is speaking the same language and can therefore move more quickly and more in sync.

The second big bucket ripe for change is collaboration and transparency. We need more ways to collaborate across jurisdictions. State and local governments are often solving the same problems in similar ways, but don’t tend to build or buy across state borders. Collaboration takes relationships and trust, and often benefits from an existing community of practice that is proactively managed and invested in. As governments increasingly create open source technology, we can improve the discoverability and replicability of these projects, so that new procurements aren’t always necessary.

To support collaboration, we can also invest in shared procurement infrastructure, such as best practice guides, sample contract language, and other resources, as well as tools like shared contract vehicles (e.g. GSA schedules) and centralized solution authorization mechanisms like FedRAMP, which take a lot of the work out of doing a new procurement or project build. A lot of great infrastructure exists and continues to be invested in at the federal level for federal agencies to take advantage of, but state/territorial and more local governments are missing out. We need to create resources and services specifically targeted to them, and provide clearer guidance on how and when they can utilize the federal tools that already exist.