Spring Training for the Major Leagues of Government

Your political bosses will invariably run for the hills, leaving you alone under the spotlight at the first sign of trouble, such as a bid protest or a Wall Street Journal, New York Times, or a Washington Post investigation. If this occurs, and you should expect scrutiny because billion-dollar programs interest many players, your best option is to close ranks with your career officials who have the experience and contacts to bring clarity to the situation. If you blame your staff, look for a scapegoat, or try to rewrite history, the game is over at halftime. You lose by four touchdowns.

Bring patience and endurance to the table. Procurement, especially a negotiated procurement, is tedious and frustrating because of the endless rules. Hardly anyone knows or understands them all. There are always surprises. Congress meddles while introducing new laws, conducting committee hearings and sometimes applying indirect pressure on specific procurements. Companies bring their own pressure to the process and may try to get you fired if you are going in a direction they feel is not in their interest.

Avoid a major grand design system requiring a negotiated contract. These can be enjoyable in the planning stage because as a senior program manager, you will receive a lot of attention from the trade press like Government Computer News and Federal Computer Week, and there will be many invitations to speak at the many forums for the Washington, D.C. technology crowd. However, numerous of these billion-dollar grand designs do in fact fail in part or completely. Press your staff to build systems in an incremental manner so you can redirect the program as you and your staff gain experience each step of the way; and noteworthy, this became government policy in 2014.