This page contains a variety of tools to help the Acquisition Workforce.
Tools
1102 Experience Development Tool
This tool is to be used by Contracting Professionals and their supervisors/mentors to identify and document participation in the most common 1102 job tasks, creation of documents, acquisition strategies and contract types in an effort to gain a depth and breadth of experience in the career field. The tool can also help illustrate areas where more experience is needed, and can help to identify training courses that can fill gaps. Spreadsheet should be downloaded and saved locally to a drive that can be shared between the employee and his/her supervisor.
If you have any suggestions that could improve this tool or have ideas for additional task/documents that could be included, please contact the FAI Helpdesk.
Accessibility Requirements Tool
GSA’s IT Accessibility Program has released the new Accessibility Requirements Tool (ART), as part of its mission to provide technical assistance to help federal agencies improve compliance and conformance with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. ART is a step-by-step guide to help you easily identify and document accessibility requirements for government procurements and contracts, as well as in-house IT development. ART is intended to help you easily incorporate the requirements outlined in the Revised 508 Standards, released January 18, 2018, into your procurement documents.
Adhering to Section 508 Standards is critical when developing accessibility requirement statements, requesting accessibility information from vendors, and creating contract terms and conditions. ART is very similar to the BuyAccessible Wizard, but it has a more modern interface and it’s written to the Revised 508 Standards so you can create government accessibility requirement statements that align with the Revised 508 Standards.
The Acquisition Gateway, built by GSA, helps federal government buyers from all agencies act as one acquisition community. The Acquisition Gateway is a workspace that provides accurate, useful, and unbiased advice. It helps federal acquisition professionals learn what they need to know, connect with others to collaborate and communicate, and act to accomplish their tasks effectively. Our goal is to help make government acquisition great.
Inside the Acquisition Gateway, you can find government-wide solution comparisons, connect with other acquisition professionals, and explore product and service category hallways. The hallways feature expert articles, templates, market research tools, prices paid data, and more to achieve successful outcomes at each step of the acquisition lifecycle.
Automated Requirements Roadmap Tool
The Automated Requirements Roadmap Tool (ARRT) was developed under a Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) initiative and is free for use by all government agencies/employees. It guides users to develop their Performance Work Statement, Quality Assurance Surveillance Plan, and Performance Requirements Summary. ARRT is a Better Buying Power job aid designed to help you improve the tradecraft in service acquisitions.
Main Features of ARRT:
- Develop performance-based service requirements following a proven process
- Create your draft Performance Work Statement (PWS), Quality Assurance Surveillance Plan (QASP), and Performance Requirements Summary (PRS)
- Utilizes standard templates for the PWS, QASP, and PRS
- Export draft documents to MS Word
- Automated MS Access Database file
The Benchmarks.gsa.gov website, developed in support of the President’s Management Agenda (PMA) Benchmarking Initiative, showcases the government-wide cost and efficiency metrics collected from agencies and allows agencies to leverage benchmark data to improve decision inputs and drive meaningful change within their mission-support functions.
The Benchmarks.gsa.gov website allows you to:
- View bureau-level data for all agencies (where reported)
- Customize peer groups to compare any set of agencies or bureaus across government
- Export data and charts to easily merge with your internal reports and planning processes
- Learn how your agency stacks up on dashboards of key metrics for each function
Please note that this site is not open to the public, but all Federal government employees and approved contractors with a MAX log-in can gain access using the following procedure:
- Go to Benchmarks.gsa.gov and click on the OMB MAX button to reach the MAX log-in screen.
- After logging into MAX, you’ll be asked to register for the benchmarks site by sending an email to benchmarks@gsa.gov with “ACCESS REQUEST” in the subject line.
- Within 24 hours you will receive an email confirming your registration. You will now be able to log onto the site with your MAX ID.
For more information on how to utilize this new tool, you can download a copy of the Benchmarks.gsa.gov User Guide.
Contract Awarded Labor Category Tool (CALC)
The CALC is a market research tool that searches a database of awarded Schedule contract prices for 48,000 labor categories from more than 5,000 Schedule contracts under the Professional Services Schedule. Rather than sifting through contract files or searching GSA Advantage!® for comparable pricing, Government contracting professionals can now use CALC to return a multitude of comparable contract prices within a matter of seconds. Additionally, these search results can be filtered by relevant criteria such as years of experience and education level. Over time, greater enhancements are anticipated, such as adding geographic filters.
Contracting Professional’s Career Roadmap
The Contracting Professional’s Career Roadmap provides Contracting Professionals with a guide to getting started in the 1102 career field. It provides a framework for the career, including gaining a basic understanding of the acquisition process, the competencies and mandatory training required, guidelines for selecting and working with a mentor, guidelines for goal setting, and best practices for documenting experiences on the job. New Contracting Professionals should work through the steps and the “to-do lists” early in their professional career with the guidance of their supervisor and/or mentor.
The Contracting Officer’s Representative Toolkit is a knowledge base tool, developed and maintained via a partnership between FAI and the Spring 2020 Leadership Excellence in Acquisition Program (LEAP) Team, Leapin’ Lizards. The COR Toolkit is intended to provide acquisition workforce members with a comprehensive set of links to policies, resources, training and communities of practice all in one place, in an easy to use format, Each heading will take you to the section with relevant links for your use; each section provides a link to return to the top of the page.
This DAU developed tool provides a color coded guide to the acquisition process. Stroll along the Red line for acquisition planning activities. Cruise along the Blue line to understand contract execution, and finish your journey down the length of the Orange line to explore the various aspects of contract administration.
A market research platform for acquisition professionals that allows them to research government-wide service contracts, their data, and their awarded vendors. Through this tool, give users the means to answer their pre-award questions without needing to issue RFIs or search across the internet.
Federal Strategic Sourcing Initiative (FSSI)
FSSI solutions provide easy access to common procurement vehicles that offer:
- Greater discounts as volume increases
- Business intelligence
- Best practice solutions
The Price Estimation Tool (PET), OASIS’ Estimating tool assists in the development of the labor portion of the independent government cost estimate (IGCE) for OASIS SB and OASIS task orders.
The Program and Project Management Toolkit is a knowledge base, developed and maintained via a partnership between FAI and the Federal Program and Project Management Community of Practice (FedPM CoP). The P/PM toolkit is intended to provide acquisition workforce members with a comprehensive set of links to policies, resources, training, playbooks and communities of practice all in one place, in an easy to use format, Each heading will take you to the section with relevant links for your use; each section provides a link to return to the top of the page.
The Defense Pricing and Contracting (DPC) Office maintains a Product Service Code (PSC) Selection Tool that is designed to help Contracting Professionals navigate and select PSCs quickly and accurately. This tool allows users to search for the right PSC by keyword search, code search, or using the Federal Government's category management (CM) spend categories. Use of the PSC Tool will assist the procurement and financial management communities in properly representing the good or service being purchased, and thereby improve contract and spend data quality.
Recognizing that communication is critical to a high performing workforce, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy (OFPP) launched a new campaign called Project InReach that’s all about you – the acquisition workforce! The campaign features the Acquisition Compass, a new resource on the Acquisition Gateway to help quickly find OFPP policies and resources.
Log into the Acquisition Gateway to review. OFPP InReach memo
Provision and Clause Matrix (FAR, DFARS, VAAR, DEAR)
To help workforce members easily navigate the FAR Provision and Clause Matrix (FAR 52.3), DAU created a tool that expands on the information contained in the FAR matrix. This DoD tool contains actual prescriptions for the use of all 1,300+ provisions and clauses contained in the FAR, DFARS, and DoD Class Deviations. This is an easy reference tool that can help contracting professionals quickly determine the applicability of a given provision or clause.
Steps to Performance-Based Acquisition (PBA)
Welcome to Steps to Performance-Based Acquisition (PBA) BETA - presenting the PBA process in easy steps, complete with samples & examples, templates and other resources to make PBA more collaborative, performance-oriented, and team-focused. To access this tool it requires an OMB MAX account.
