Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA) launched its version of the Contract Management Process Guide (CMPG) on April 1.

CMPG is intended to provide consolidated guidance, electronically, to the NAVSEA workforce on acquisition policies, processes and practices, thereby saving time, money and effort.

Prior to the launch of NAVSEA’s CMPG in April, NAVSEA relied on a patchwork of acquisition policies, institutional knowledge, site-specific instructions and tools, phone calls to other agencies, and internet searches for answers to contracting questions.

Tom Bikowski and Frank Radocha, both re-employed annuitants recalled to serve as Strategic Training Coordinators in the SEA 02 office, decided something needed to change.

“Frank and I have been involved from the beginning,” Bikowski said. The two began researching means to codify and define the contracting processes for NAVSEA in 2017.  This was actually an outgrowth of their effort to improve contract training for NAVSEA contracting personnel.

“How do you do a sustainable training program for an entire competency of people?” Bikowski said. “We came to the conclusion that you can’t train everything. We couldn’t establish anything sustainable until we knew where the gaps were. Everything was passed down verbally, but the information was lost as people turned over.”

Bikowski and Radocha each have over 30 years’ experience in contracting. Together they realized the biggest gap was the lack of codified processes for contracting.

“We’ve never had codified processes,” Radocha said. “When people came in to NAVSEA, especially from other agencies, what they would do if they couldn’t find something at NAVSEA, they’d resort back to the processes or information they used in the past.”

This decentralized approach resulted in multiple ways of doing contracting within the NAVSEA enterprise, resulting in a lower level of efficiency. NAVSEA is an organization dedicated to both the on-time delivery of ships and submarines to the warfighter as well as speedy improvement of the warfighting capabilities, and those goals were negatively impacted by the state of NAVSEA’s contracting process. Bikowski and Radocha believed they could revolutionize the way acquisition professionals obtained information.

The two paused their training efforts and, instead, started looking around the Navy at other organizations and how they codified contracting processes. Naval Information Warfare Systems Command, known at the time as Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) had developed the original CMPG, which Bikowski and Radocha liked.

“SPAWAR’s CMPG was more geared towards just their contracting operation, and this was something we believed was sustainable for our contracting competency,” Bikowski said.

They requested permission to proceed from the NAVSEA Director of Contracts, Cindy Shaver. Shaver agreed, but asked them to involve Carrie Lawson on their team to obtain a Warfare Center perspective. Lawson was the head of the Contracts Department at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC) Division, Keyport.

“My role was at the beginning to help Frank and Tom create the cultural framework for CMPG, get the buy-in for the funding, and presenting that vision to Cindy Shaver,” said Lawson.

The three decided to save time by leveraging the SPAWAR CMPG instead of trying to invent something new. Bikowski, Radocha, and Lawson traveled to San Diego to see SPAWAR’s CMPG system first-hand. Although the system was good, it needed to be updated to reflect NAVSEA-specific policies, processes, and practices. Coincidentally, the CMPG was implemented on the iNFUSION collaborative website platform, and this provided an ideal foundation for the construction of a NAVSEA-specific CMPG.

“We were essentially able to take SPAWAR’s system and upload it into iNFUSION,” said Bikowski. “After that, we created the (leveraging) team, of which Trelli Davis was the lead, to pull together and review every single phase of the federal, DoD, Navy and NAVSEA contracting and regulatory process so we could put it all in one location.”

Davis was SPAWAR’s primary architect of an earlier version called the SCPPM. NAVSEA recruited Davis to join the NAVSEA family, bringing her on board in 2018.

“Trelli was the person that put together the more recent SPAWAR version of CMPG,” Radocha said. “She was one of the leading people on that team.”

Lawson credits Davis’ boundless energy and enthusiasm for much of the success of the development of NAVSEA’s CMPG.

“It’s hard to pull together a team working virtually from all the shipyards and warfare center sites,” Lawson said. “She was able to pull people together to work successfully despite the distance.”

Davis, Bikowski, and Radocha then spent over nine months building NAVSEA’s version of the CMPG. It was a project Davis said she was excited to become a part of, particularly because of the potential for CMPG to speed the contracting process and have a measurable impact on NAVSEA efforts.

“CMPG is designed to capture the goodness and make the process much more efficient and much easier for everyone who has to work with contracts,” Davis said. Pulling CMPG up on her computer monitor, Davis will take an interested person on a brief, but comprehensive, guided tour. “I believe this takes a lot of time out of the process and makes everything more efficient.  By not spending hours looking for something, those are hours I use to write the document, or even started another one after the first one.”

Contracting involves a five-step process: planning, solicitation, evaluation, award, and post-award. The legal requirements of these steps are spelled out in federal regulations books including: the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS), and the Navy/Marine Corps Acquisition Regulation Supplement (NMCARS).

The FAR, DFARS, and NMCARS do not define the contracting process or policy for a particular command. Davis said that pertinent information from the regulations was uploaded to CMPG in the relevant steps within the process flow, and can be updated in real-time if any of three regulations books are updated. Additionally, specific tools needed by contracting officials are listed in each section’s pages, creating a handy, virtual toolbox for the contracting official.

Lawson said that, although CMPG’s use is in the early stages, she has seen a definite increase in the speed with which policy changes are happening.

“Where I have seen quantifiable change is the ability to make policy changes more quickly,” said Lawson. “For example, if we have questions come up during meetings, or feel our documentation is lacking in some way, we make the change and within one day it’s made across CMPG. It reduces mistakes and makes information more readily available.”

Davis said another goal the team accomplished was ensuring consistency across CMPG sections and the delivery of regulatory information infused with process guidance. .

“Every document in CMPG is set up the same, no matter where you are in NAVSEA,” Davis said. “If I’m here at NUWC Division, Keyport, or I’m working at NAVSEA headquarters, the documents and references should be consistent. This saves time for the worker, and time in training since a person can work in any part of NAVSEA and still know how to navigate the contracting process.”

NAVSEA’s CMPG went live across NAVSEA on iNFUSION “NAVSEA Acquisition Policy” webpage on Apr. 1, and has had an immediate impact on how fast NAVSEA personnel can move through the contracting process, while reducing the level of frustration experienced by the workforce when working through the maze of contracting regulations, policies, and procedures.

“Our primary goal was to give the workforce a system/process that is reliable, easy to follow and enhances their ability to do their day-to-day job,” said Bikowski. “We believe that the CMPG, built using iNFUSION software tools, has effectively met that objective.”

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