DHS contractingDoing business with DHS: Ranking DHS’s contracting officers

Firms bidding on federal contracts often have to deal with changing requirements and shifting deadlines. In order to provide more clarity to the process, consultants at GovTribe have launched Purse String Index (PSI), a paid tool which ranks the contracting officers at different federal agencies based on how frequently they award contracts, the length of the procurement process, the average dollar value of the contracts awarded, and the officers’ “annoyance factor,” which is based on how often the contracting officer modifies a solicitation after it has been posted and how often deadlines are changed.

“We think it’s pretty reasonable to penalize contracting officers for due date changes because that does affect contractors’ bottom line,” GovTribe co-founder Marc Vogtman said.

Nextgov reports that Vogtman and GovTribe’s two other founders are former consultants with Deloitte’s federal practice, who managed bidding on government contracts. CEO Nate Nash said they launched GovTribe in 2012 because they saw inefficiencies in the bidding process and in the way contracts were advertised.

GovTribe’s PSI for contracting officers at DHS was shared with Nextgov. The index is built with publicly available contracting information from FBO.gov. It grades anyone listed as the main point of contact for a DHS solicitation during the past five years, and Vogtman cautioned that roughly 1,100 names listed in the index may be contractors working in specific projects rather than full-time DHS contracting personnel.

The index reveals a significant variance in contracting officers’ average number of modifications from less than two to more than fourteen. The index reports that most contracting officers average in the mid-single digits. The average number of due date changes varies less, with only a few people who worked on multiple contracts averaging more than one.

GovTribe weighed all the factors in the PSI, using a proprietary algorithm, to produce a Purse String score between zero and five. Nash said that any score above one is above average. The algorithm takes into account that higher value solicitations are likely to be more complex and require more modifications.

“Imagine this like the stats on the back of a baseball card,” Nash told Nextgov. “It will give you some indication of the player’s performance and if you combine those stats with other indicators it will give you more insight into the potential return on investment of submitting a proposal.”