Army Contracting Pushing for Awards in 6 Months or Less

Army Contracting Pushing for Awards in 6 Months or Less

Speakers on a panel at AUSA2024
Photo by: Tasos Katopodis for AUSA

The Army talks a lot about speeding up the acquisitions process, but Army Contracting Command has a new, concrete goal: No more than six months to award a contract, executive director Danielle Moyer said Oct. 16 at the Association of the U.S. Army's Annual Meeting and Exposition.

The days when it took two years to make an award decision are over, she said.  

"We've really gotten away from the hundreds of pages of written proposals, right?" Moyer said. "You get 800 pages and document everything, and you probably get kicked out of a competition because your font was wrong."

Or, as has been the case for more than one program, by the time the contract is awarded and the equipment has been developed and fielded, the problem it was intended to solve has evolved and the equipment is no longer relevant. 

Instead, the Army is moving toward a model where contracting starts with a conversation, rather than what Moyer described as an "overly prescriptive process" where the Army lays out whether a contract will be fixed-price or cost-reimbursement, every deliverable it wants to see and then vendors write a dissertation on how they can fulfill those requirements. 

"Wouldn't the world be so much better if I just told you the problem, you propose back a solution, and then we determine the contract type based on your solution, instead of me pre-determining everything?" Moyer said. "So, we're going to start piloting that, because that could go faster.”

Industry has noticed the changes, the CEO of Govini, a software contractor, told the audience. 

"You know, we participate in this system," said Tara Murphy Dougherty. "So, we're going to keep pushing back when things look broken, but we will also happily show up and play when you reciprocate by demonstrating that you're following along and you're trying to get to the right place to keep the ecosystem of competition among industry players as big as possible."

— Meghann Myers for AUSA