In GovCon, we often refer to the time it takes to go from requirement to contract award as ”Procurement Action Lead Time”, or PALT. The idea is that the shorter the PALT, the faster the government customer gets their stuff to meet their mission. In short, a lower PALT is better. See Episode 412 for more on PALT.

Decreasing PALT is good…but how do we actually do that? Documenting the requirement in enough detail can be a challenges and time consuming process, as we discussed in Episode 473 (Writing Requirements). Plus, the acquisition planning process is rarely streamlined to decrease PALT (see Episode 436 for more on Acquisition Plans). What can the acquisition teams do to decrease PALT with this headwind?

One way is for the acquisition team to build on what other government teams are doing instead of starting from scratch. The FAR makes many suggestions about using existing resources to execute contracts, such as other agencies’ customer specs, requirements documents, RFIs, DRFPs, RFPs, contracts, etc. (We detail an example of this in Episode 384 on the Economy Act). However, the challenge is often finding those resources without feeling like we’re looking for a needle in a haystack.

In this episode, Mike Weiland from Govly joins me to discuss why and how the use of cross-agency resources decreases PALT and some tools we can use to find those resources.