The DOD Acquisition community is entirely incapable of preparing a “should cost” estimate, because none in there ranks can write down what they “should want”.
They write “requirements” that range from too general to over prescriptive.
Then they want state of the art, development technology, at a “fixed price”.
There is a better way to go about this, but the acquisition rules don’t allow for best value to prevail.
Did I mention that within DOD, the acquisition arena is the Purgatory of one’s career. You get through it, you don’t specialize in it! Certainly not in the technical skill sets.
Fly, then fix. Much cheaper.
/johnny
The DOD Acquisition community is entirely incapable of preparing a “should cost” estimate, because none in there ranks can write down what they “should want”.
They write “requirements” that range from too general to over prescriptive.
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Right. I was a professional in the Quality discipline and worked for a DoD prime contractor. The Army agreed to pay the company for a should-cost team to analyze the bid by one of our major subcontractors.
The team began with about 30 people but was whittled down to only about a dozen of us after the first month. We traveled from TX to CA every Sunday afternoon and flew back to TX every Friday night, from May until early October, with only about three weeks when we did not travel.
There were a couple of Army officers that we frequently briefed at the facility in CA, but they did basically nothing except apply pressure when the subcontractor was refusing to provide information to our requests.
I was able to disallow about 30% of the bid for Quality efforts and other team members also were able to disallow portions of the bid that fell within their disciplines.
The effort saved my company money and saved the Army money, in spite of what it must have cost for support for the team for five months.