Table For 1

I was blow away yesterday when I came in to work and saw this in the lobby. It is a table set for one person. A place setting, a rose in a vase with dark and red sand and a yellow ribbon. A shaker of salt, spilled. A candle. Flags representing every branch of the service as well as the American flag representing civilians. A wine glass, up-side down because no one will ever drink from it.

I don't know who from my agency was responsible for putting this together, but thanks.

Innovative Fun

I have to say that this was a lot of fun and is very high tech. Some friends and I went to Top Golf in Alexandria. Imagine a driving range made by geeks. That is what Top Golf is. First thing you sign in and get a card. With the card you go to a kiosk where you get a basket of golf balls. Mind you, these aren't just any balls. These balls have RFID chips in them. When you swipe your card the machine assigns your ID to each of the balls that it distributes for you. This will become clear later.

Then you find a piece of Astroturf and get ready to tee it up. Now I'm terrible at golf. I haven't swung a club in about a million years. You dump your balls in the bin and then when you are ready to play, you slide it through what I'll call an activator, put it on the tee and swing away.

A normal driving range will have a big lawn and a few flags letting you know where 150, 200 and 250 yards are. This place is different. Instead it has targets, some of the closer ones are about 5 to 7 feet in diameter and the more distant ones are 10 to 15 feet. This creates a possibility for a completely different dynamic of game play.

If you want to just hit the ball, no problem, have at it. If you want to play a game that keeps score, the Top Golf game, try to get as many balls as possible into the targets. The closer targets score less than the further ones. There are other games in which the computer tells you which targets to shoot for.

Overall, this was a great experience. The only thing I would change in their formula would be to make it more social. It isn't like bowling where you can have 4 different people in a lane and each takes turns. Instead, each person has his or her own bay. This made it more difficult to have that competition and ribbing among friends. If you've never been, you should go.

Performance-Based

I know, I've written a lot about performance based contracting, but there is an article today over at FCW. I guess we know who is not getting a Christmas card from the Kelman family. But in practice what Lieberman writes is good for another reason too.

If you are paying for performance, you invoice process is a lot easier. I used to go through the invoices and look at the people, then look at their hours. I had to compare what we were paying for against what is realistic. More than a couple times I found companies trying to bill the government for 150 hours in a week. I would remind them that there are only 168 hours in a week and the person had to sleep at some point. But if we are paying for the result, regardless of how much effort was applied, then the invoice process can work more efficiently.

If we're paying for requirements and design documents, developed iterations and deployed software, quite frankly, I don't care if you can do it with 1 person or 100 people. All I care about is that it is done with the specified quality, scope, on time, with high levels of customer satisfaction, low levels of residual risk and at the agreed-upon price. That's my triple constraint (x2). But the contractor can identify the approach that works best for them in meeting those performance metrics.

This type of process encourages, and in fact rewards efficiency. The lower the vendor can get its costs the greater the profit margin.

Anyway, Kelman is notorious for firing back, and I'm sure he won't let Lieberman have the last word. Stay tuned.

FAPIIS

I read an article today over at Government Executive to Expand a Contractor Performance Database. This is generally a good idea but I think there is a problem with the trajectory based on the article. There was a phrase in the article, "culls contractor data from a number of disparate databases and government records."

The problem here is the data. I have seen some of the data from databases that will be culled. The data quality is wildly inconsistent. This type of service can only be effective if the data reported is of consistently high quality. So the first phase of this project must focus on defining quality data, identifying low quality data and cleaning it up. You can take data from PPIRS and CPS, but if the data quality is bad, then deriving something useful from it is very unlikely.

There is no question that a system can be built that will pull this data together to provide people visibility into contractor performance. But that visibility will likely not be an accurate depiction of the real contractor performance until rules concerning data quality are established and enforced. Try it for yourself. Try to look in these systems for a company that you know to be good and one that you know to be bad. Compare what you find in the systems. I performed this exercise and found that the bad company actually looked pretty good and the good one looked pretty good too. Is that fair? The point of these systems is to differentiate one contractor from another. If everyone still smells rosy then we are missing the point.

Building a Monitoring Capability

I was honored to deliver a presentation at the National WIC Association on May 3. The title of the presentation was "Building a Monitoring Capability". I used one of my recently completed development projects as a framework for:

• Constructing a Business Case
• Marching through Requirements and Design
• Demonstrating the V-model
• Discussing Contract types
• Considering Development Life-cycles and
• Being proactive with Training

Overall the presentation was well-received. I got to see some of the people from my travels around the country. I also heard that the program was pleased to have someone from IT talking about the very specific tools and processes that are necessary for an application development project.

But this is what we as IT people should be doing. We have to get out into the business. If we have something that works we have a responsibility to help people to understand that and to leverage it. Here, in my project, I was successful and I now have a good sense of how that success can be replicated. I'm putting this on my blog to share it with you as well. I know that it lacks a soundtrack, but much of the content is self explanatory. I hope you can find a nugget or two.