Commercial Solutions Opening
Expand Contract Type Options The next policy change recommendation involves a more material revision to the CSO authority by expanding the available contract types for awards, including time-and-materials or labor-hour. Since CSOs are soliciting innovative solutions, it is reasonable to assume that offerors may not always be able to precisely estimate the work required to achieve their potentially groundbreaking goal. Although time-and-materials contracts are used when it is not possible to estimate accurately the extent or duration of the work or to anticipate costs with any reasonable degree of confidence, it should be noted that these contracts are considered high risk since they do not provide any incentive to the contractor for cost control or labor efficiency.
Although time-and-materials contracts are used when it is not possible to estimate accurately the extent or duration of the work or to anticipate costs with any reasonable degree of confidence, it should be noted that these contracts are considered high risk since they do not provide any incentive to the contractor for cost control or labor efficiency.
It would be doing a disservice to the government to lose the possibility of awarding a contract for that product, technology, or service because the offeror did not want to submit a fixed-price proposal and risk their profit potential should it take more effort or resources to complete the contract objectives than the offeror had first proposed. This recommendation could be considered by a DFARS proposed rule or class deviation to expand the language of DFARS 212.70 to include provisions of expanded contract types in awards from CSOs. Formal Training Through Defense Acquisition University For the first training and development recommendation, we recommend DAU develop and offer a standalone training course on CSOs. It should begin with comparing the differences from FAR- based solicitation techniques and identifying the processes and/or documentation that it bypasses for the special purpose of streamlining contract awards for innovative solutions. The actions described here are
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Defense ARJ , Spring 2025, Vol. 32 No. 1
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