Commercial Solutions Opening
TABLE 1. CSO CROSS TALKS—TRAINING AND INFORMATION SHARING
Category
Findings
Contracting organizations should create a training team to do a deep dive into tactical processes for each CSO spiral, identify best practices, and target areas that have historically performed inconsistently (resulted in 3-month award time savings, helped mitigate protests, and expedited purchases). PCOs should understand that there are different challenges than a typical acquisition because solutions can vary widely (e.g., type of money needed, bona fide need, base spectrum approvals, Authorization to Operate requirement). DoD should stand up an Outreach Team to equip acquisition professionals with training, best practices, success stories, resources, and DoD-level and industry collaboration opportunities. DoD and contracting organizations should train on CSO policy/procedures to show how they differ from FAR-based acquisitions (e.g., know what processes/documents affect each contract from CSO level vs. individual contract level). DoD and contracting organizations should be educated on what authorities, regulations, and policies are available and how to differentiate among them.
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Note. Adapted from DoD OT Quarterly Commercial Solutions Opening Cross Talk [Bulletin], Department of Defense (2022); PCOs = Procuring Contracting Officers; CSO = Commercial Solutions Opening.
TABLE 2. CSO CROSS TALKS—INTERNAL AGENCY PROCESSES
Category
Findings
Contracting organizations’ PCOs obligated awards competitively, within 60 days, and with substantial negotiated savings. Contracting organizations should assign a PCO to chair the execution team (a significant amount of confusion and rework reduced by establishing a PCO at the head of the evaluation and execution teams). PCOs did not observe awards from CSOs as a short process or end-of-year effort due to multiple workshops, time to develop problem statements, and acquisition process taking numerous months. Contracting organization observed a lack of accurate CSO data reporting for DoD as a whole. Contracting organization required a large team to evaluate over 500 submissions for different organizations in a reasonable amount of time. PCOs should ensure funding is ready to obligate from their program offices in order to quickly move to reduce or scale the requirement based on the available funding and then promptly award the contract (waited on funding for eight months in one instance). Contracting organizations and PCOs should establish a cloud-based document repository. The fast pace of the CSO process required an organized central repository for emails, documents, and spreadsheets that could be accessed by many and restricted as necessary. PCOs should decide how they will share documents with those that are not able to access the cloud-based document repository (e.g., contracted technical evaluators). PCOs should make sure all processes, procedures, and contractor responses under the CSO are uniform (also applies to Solicitation Definition section). PCOs should ensure acquisition/evaluation teams are filing electronic documents in a standardized manner. Continued on the next page
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Defense ARJ , Spring 2025, Vol. 32 No. 1
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