National Contract Management Association Aerospace

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National Contract Management AssociationAerospace
Defense Contract Management Conference

• Debra Johnson
• Director, Office of Procurement
• Johnson Space Center

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Content

• Challenges with Program Transition
• Organizational Conflict of Interest
• Implementing Earned Value on Fixed Price
  Contracts
• Agency Pricing Capability

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Challenges with Acquisition Workforce

• Aging workforce
• - NASA Contractors face similar concerns
• - Ability/budget to hire issues
• Critical Skill Retention
• - Complete current mission while planning
  
• and executing new mission to the moon
  and Mars

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Organizational Conflict of Interests

• Small pool of aerospace contractors combined with
  large number of Cx, Shuttle, and ISS contracts
  results in much greater potential for OCI among
  the procurements.
• It is feared that concerns about being awarded
  one contract only to be prevented from future
  competitions may have a chilling effect on the
  competitive marketplace and inappropriately
  restrain competition.

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Implementing Earned Value on Fixed Price Contracts

• NASA has traditionally not used EVM for FFP
  contracts
• - Used primarily for development
  production contracts
• - Used to control cost and schedule risk
• Potential application to FFP contracts, if
• - Multiple cost schedule variables
• - Risk is worth the additional cost of
  managing to an EVM system
• NASA uses EVM on Program level contracts
• Not all COs/Program Managers have extensive EVM
  experience

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Agency Pricing Capability

• Limited set of Pricing Professionals
• Hiring Challenges
• Skill Development
• Multiple Major Competition Activities
• Contracting out analysis assistance is possible
• Funding challenges