Government Contracting Is a Business Strategy, Not Just a Procurement Function

Why the Best Acquisition Professionals Think Like Business Advisors

When people outside of government contracting think about procurement, they may picture a fairly transactional process. A program office identifies something it needs, prepares a requisition, sends it to contracting, and the contracting office goes out and buys it.

There is certainly a process that has to be followed. Federal acquisition involves laws, regulations, competition requirements, documentation, approvals, and stewardship of taxpayer dollars. But after spending much of my career in contracting and procurement, I came to see the role differently.

The best contracting professionals are not simply buyers or administrators of a procurement process. They are business advisors.

Their job is not only to ask, "How do I award this contract?" It is to understand what the organization is trying to accomplish and help determine the most effective acquisition strategy for getting there.

That means looking beyond the requisition sitting in front of you. It means understanding the mission, asking questions, looking for patterns across the organization, understanding the marketplace, challenging assumptions when necessary, anticipating future requirements, and helping program leaders translate what they need into contracts that can actually deliver it.

It also means something I learned early in my career and carried with me throughout it:

It is better to be proactive than reactive.

I Learned Contracting by Seeing What Happens at the End

I began my contracting career working in contract closeout.

Looking back, it may have been one of the best places I could have started — because closeout allowed me to see the consequences of decisions that had been made years earlier.

By the time a contract reaches closeout, there is nowhere for problems to hide. A statement of work that never clearly defined what the contractor was supposed to deliver — and what "done" actually looked like — showed its consequences in modifications, disputes, and sometimes terminations for poor performance. Poor administration left contracts in a state where no one could confidently say what the current status was.

Someone at closeout had to reconstruct that history and determine how to resolve it.

Missing documentation, unresolved modifications, unclear requirements, incomplete records, payment issues, and poorly defined deliverables made from decisions throughout the life of the contract eventually had to be reconciled.

That experience shaped the way I approached contracting for the rest of my career.

When you are reactive — working under the wire and trying to get an acquisition completed before a deadline — mistakes happen. Not because people are careless or because they intend to make mistakes, but because urgency compresses the amount of time available to ask questions, examine alternatives, conduct meaningful market research, coordinate stakeholders, and think through the consequences of a decision.

When you are proactive, you have time to build a better acquisition.

And a better acquisition usually results in a better contract.

Look Beyond the Requisition — and Across the Organization

Strategic thinking started fairly early for me. During my military contracting career, requisitions could arrive in droves. I might have a stack of twenty requirements in front of me at one time. Rather than automatically treating those as twenty unrelated transactions, I would look across them for similarities.

Were several offices requesting the same types of products? Could multiple requirements be purchased through the same existing source? Could similar purchases be grouped and competed together rather than processed separately? For relatively straightforward purchases, the solution might be as simple as combining similar requirements into one procurement and separating different organizations' needs through individual line items.

As my career progressed and I began supporting larger federal and defense organizations, the same principle appeared on a much larger scale. An organization might have an IT department, finance department, administrative organization, and multiple program offices — each developing its own requirements. When viewed individually, every purchase might appear perfectly reasonable. But when you looked across the organization

, something else became visible.

Multiple purchase orders or contracts with the same company for similar goods or services. Different offices buying substantially the same thing independently because no one had stepped back far enough to recognize the common demand.

Sometimes we found these opportunities by reviewing our own workloads. Other times they surfaced during weekly or biweekly contracting meetings. Someone would begin talking about a requirement they were working on and another contracting professional might say, "That sounds very similar to something I have." That would lead to a conversation.

Let's compare the requirements. Let's talk to the program offices. Are these really separate needs, or are they pieces of a larger organizational requirement?

Strategic acquisition often begins by seeing connections that disappear when every requirement is viewed in isolation. The requirement sitting in front of you is not necessarily the whole requirement. Sometimes you have to look around it.

Design the Acquisition Around the Pattern of Demand

Combining requirements is not simply an administrative exercise.

When organizations aggregate legitimate common demand, purchasing at scale can strengthen their buying position and often improve pricing. Larger commitments can sometimes improve delivery priority as well. But the larger strategic benefit becomes apparent when the need is recurring.

If several organizations need a particular product today, combining the current purchase may be sufficient. If several organizations will continue needing that product or service over the next several years, the better answer may be a contract vehicle designed around that pattern of demand.

That is where indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contracts and other ordering vehicles become valuable. Instead of repeatedly recreating the procurement process — developing another solicitation, requesting proposals, receiving bids, evaluating them, and making another standalone award — the organization can establish a competitively awarded vehicle with a streamlined method for placing future orders.

An office that does not need something this year may already know it will need it next year. Another component may have an emerging requirement six months from now. Thinking strategically means asking whether the acquisition being designed today can appropriately accommodate those foreseeable needs tomorrow.

That saves more than procurement time. It can reduce administrative burden throughout the organization and create a more consistent way of purchasing and managing common requirements.

The question is no longer simply: How do we buy this?

It becomes: What acquisition structure gives the organization the best combination of competition, value, speed, flexibility, and administrative efficiency over time?

A Good Contract Has to Define Success

Strategic contracting is not only about selecting the right vehicle.

Some of the most complex requirements I supported involved major IT services, system implementations, and software development efforts. In those situations, issuing a contract was only the beginning. The program office needed to know whether the contractor was actually succeeding.

That meant spending time with the statement of work and specifications and asking much deeper questions.

What exactly is the contractor expected to deliver? What does the program office need to see in a monthly or quarterly program management report? What quality requirements matter? What are the appropriate key performance indicators? How will the agency know whether the implementation is progressing successfully? What does success actually look like?

A contracting professional may never possess every piece of technical knowledge that the program office does — and shouldn't pretend to. But we need to understand the requirement well enough to ask intelligent questions about what is being purchased, what the contractor is expected to accomplish, and how performance will be evaluated.

A good contract does more than describe activity. It creates a framework for determining whether the government is receiving the outcome it needs. When those expectations are clearly defined before award, contract administration becomes significantly more manageable afterward — and the problems I witnessed at closeout become far less likely to occur.

Sometimes the Most Valuable Thing a Contracting Professional Can Do Is Ask Questions

There were certainly times when a program office would hand over a statement of work, identify the vendor it wanted, and essentially say, "Just buy it."

And sometimes, after reading the statement of work, I did not think it was ready.

That could create resistance. The customer had already put work into the requirement and believed it adequately described what was needed.

My approach was not simply to hand it back and tell them it was wrong. I would read through it, make notes about questions and gaps, and then sit down with the person responsible for the requirement.

I would ask: Tell me in your own words what you are trying to do. What are you trying to buy? What do you need this service to accomplish? What is your end game? What do you expect the contractor to deliver?

Then I would compare what I heard with what was actually written.

I could say, "This is what you just told me you need. Here is what the statement of work currently says. These are the places where I don't think the document captures what you just described."

Sometimes I could return the document with comments and the program office would revise it. Other times, particularly when there was resistance or when the requirement was complex, we would sit together in a conference room, project the statement of work onto a screen, and work through it line by line and comment by comment. We would revise it together. We would develop clearer deliverables. Then I would send the revised version back and ask the program office to review it one more time.

Does this capture what we discussed? Is anything missing? Is there anything you would change?

The goal was never to take ownership of the program's requirement away from them. They understood their mission and technical need. My role was to help translate that need into a procurement that industry could understand and respond to.

That translation also serves competition. When federal taxpayer dollars are being spent, the government has a responsibility to provide appropriate competition rather than continually selecting a particular company simply because that is the company an office already knows or prefers. A clearly written requirement centered on the government's actual need gives capable companies a fairer opportunity to demonstrate that they can meet it.

Market Research Is Paramount

Good acquisition strategy requires meaningful market research.

The program office has an important role in conducting research as it develops the requirement. It needs to understand what solutions are available, who is providing them, and approximately what the requirement may cost.

But when the requirement reaches contracting, the contracting professional also has due diligence to perform.

I never believed my job was simply to accept a statement of work and issue the solicitation without scrutiny. I needed to understand it. I needed to know enough about what we were purchasing to recognize whether requirements were unnecessarily restrictive, whether the acquisition appeared tilted toward one solution or vendor, whether alternative approaches existed, and whether the marketplace could support meaningful competition.

That does not mean becoming the technical expert. It means developing enough business and market understanding to exercise judgment.

Market research is not paperwork performed to satisfy a file requirement. Done well, it helps shape the acquisition strategy itself — and it helps prevent the kind of poorly scoped requirements that surface as problems at the end of a contract's life.

Build the Relationship Before the Requirement Becomes an Emergency

Some of the best acquisition work begins months before a solicitation is ever issued.

When contracting and program offices build an ongoing relationship, conversations change. Instead of hearing, "This contract expires in two weeks and we need another one," the contracting professional may know nine months or a year in advance that the requirement is coming.

That changes everything. There is time to ask what has changed since the previous acquisition. There is time to conduct market research. There is time to improve the statement of work. There is time to define meaningful deliverables and performance measures.

And there is time to ask another one of my preferred questions: What's coming up? What contracts are expiring? What new requirements are being discussed? What does your organization expect to need next year? Have you talked with other department heads about similar needs?

Those conversations create visibility beyond the immediate workload. They also build trust. When program officials understand that contracting is there to help them accomplish their mission — not simply to enforce rules or tell them what they cannot do — they are more likely to bring contracting into the conversation early. Communication improves. Planning improves. Requirements improve.

And ultimately, the contract improves.

Strategy Also Means Knowing When Not to Consolidate

None of this means every similar requirement should automatically be combined into one large contract. Strategic acquisition requires judgment.

Some requirements are sufficiently unique that consolidation does not make business sense. In other circumstances, an organization may have significant investments in a particular software platform, equipment configuration, or service model. Moving to something different may mean replacing equipment, retraining personnel, converting data, redesigning processes, introducing integration challenges, or risking disruption to mission-critical operations. Those costs and risks have to be considered.

There may be circumstances in which the analysis supports continued use of a particular source, subject to the appropriate legal authority, justification, documentation, and approvals required for a noncompetitive acquisition.

There are other circumstances where concentration itself creates risk. Standardizing a system across an organization can generate substantial efficiencies. But in a mission-critical environment, leaders may also need to consider redundancy and resilience. Does putting an entire critical capability with one provider create a vulnerability? Would having an independent backup or alternative source reduce organizational risk?

These are business questions. The answer cannot simply be "consolidate everything" or "compete everything." The answer has to come from understanding the requirement, the market, the economics, the mission, and the risk.

Contracting Professionals Belong at the Business Table

The Federal Acquisition Regulation itself describes an acquisition system built around teamwork, planning, market research, competition, sound business judgment, and best value. In practice, achieving those objectives requires contracting professionals to do far more than process transactions.

We need to understand the customer's mission, ask questions, look across organizational boundaries, recognize patterns of demand, understand the marketplace, help translate operational needs into clear requirements, and think about performance and contract administration before the contract is ever awarded. Sometimes we need to respectfully challenge what has been handed to us. That is not about making procurement more difficult — it is about producing better business outcomes while remaining responsible stewards of public funds.

My philosophy throughout much of my career has been simple: it is better to be proactive than reactive.

A reactive acquisition starts with a deadline.

A proactive acquisition starts with a conversation.

When contracting professionals are brought into that conversation early, they have the opportunity to help organizations think beyond the transaction in front of them and determine the strategy that best supports the mission. That is why I have never viewed contracting as simply a procurement function.

At its best, government contracting is business strategy — and the contracting professional is one of the organization's most important business advisors.

Regulatory and Reference Resources

FAR 1.102 — Statement of Guiding Principles for the Federal Acquisition System The foundational regulatory statement supporting the "business advisor" thesis. FAR 1.102 explicitly calls for best value, competition, sound business judgment, and a commitment to achieving the government's mission through effective acquisition.

FAR Part 7 — Acquisition Planning Mandates early and collaborative acquisition planning. FAR 7.102 requires that agencies perform acquisition planning for all acquisitions, and FAR 7.104 establishes general procedures emphasizing cross-functional involvement and advance planning — the regulatory basis for the proactive approach described throughout this article.

FAR 7.105 — Contents of Written Acquisition Plans Outlines what comprehensive acquisition planning must address, including market conditions, acquisition considerations, performance requirements, and contract administration.

FAR Part 10 — Market Research Codifies the market research obligation described in this article. FAR Part 10 requires agencies to conduct market research before developing requirements documents and before soliciting offers, supporting the argument that market research is a strategic discipline, not an administrative checkbox.

FAR Subpart 16.5 — Indefinite-Delivery Contracts (IDIQ) The regulatory authority for the ordering vehicle strategy discussed in "Design the Acquisition Around the Pattern of Demand." Indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contracts under FAR 16.504 allow agencies to structure acquisitions around patterns of recurring demand.

Congressional Research Service — Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity Contracts A concise, authoritative overview of IDIQ contract vehicles, their benefits, and their role in strategic federal acquisition.

DAU Adaptive Acquisition Framework — IDIQ Contracts The Defense Acquisition University's practical guidance on when and how to use IDIQ vehicles as part of a broader acquisition strategy.

GAO-21-491 — Federal Contracting: Senior Leaders Should Use Leading Companies' Key Practices to Improve Performance A GAO report directly supporting the argument that federal contracting should incorporate private-sector strategic management disciplines, including proactive planning, relationship management, and performance measurement.

GAO-14-36 — Small Business Contracting: Updated Guidance and Reporting Needed for Consolidated Contracts Supports the nuanced discussion of when not to consolidate, particularly the considerations around contract bundling, small business access, and the need for deliberate judgment rather than automatic aggregation.

OMB Guidance — "Smart, Aggressive Consolidation" of Federal Procurement for Common Goods and Services (2025) Current OMB policy reinforcing the strategic consolidation approach discussed in this article, while emphasizing the need for sound judgment in its application.

DAU/WARU — Contract Closeout: Lessons Learned Supports the article's opening discussion of what contract closeout reveals about the quality of decisions made throughout a contract's life — and why getting it right at the beginning matters.

FAI Contracting Officer Toolkit A practical resource for acquisition professionals, illustrating the broad scope of skills and business judgment that effective contracting officers are expected to bring to their work.