Solutions provides interactive, hands-on training courses that incorporate best practices, relevant examples, application exercises and templates. Solutions' senior experts develop and deliver our courses, providing practical guidance and useful insights, and real world anecdotes from decades of government and industry experience. Our courses are highly customizable and tailored to the specific needs of the participants.

Courses include:

• Performance-Based Acquisition (PBA)
• Federal Acquisition: An Orientation for Federal Executives
• Administering and Monitoring PBA Contracts

Descriptions of these three courses are below.

Performance-Based Acquisition Training

Solutions' PBA training is geared to help federal agencies increase the effectiveness of their contracting efforts by offering:

• Thorough understanding of the fundamental techniques of performance-based acquisition
• Ability to determine when PBA is relevant and appropriate
• Skills to immediately develop and implement performance-based requirements, solicitations, including statements of objectives and performance work statements, and monitoring methods
• Technical assistance to identify desired outcomes and define meaningful metrics
• Understanding of how to achieve predictable results and performance
• Templates for future use in developing PBA technical documents.

Acquisition Essentials

Federal acquisition is a complex process, especially to program officials and those new to government service. Acquisition Essentials focuses on the fundamental elements needed to successfully navigate the acquisition process. The class uses practical exercises and templates to address critical milestones in the process, while addressing common challenges and pitfalls. From the daylong class, participants will learn about:

• The importance of acquisition and current reform initiatives
• Roles and responsibilities in the acquisition process
• Elements of an effective Statement of Work
• Practical proposal instructions and meaningful evaluation criteria
• Completing the source selection process
• How industry responds to government solicitations
• The basics of Performance-Based Acquisition

Federal Acquisition: An Orientation for Federal Executives

Nearly all federal executives rely on contractors to perform some aspect of the agency's mission. Their understanding of the basics of federal acquisition is critical to meeting program and agency goals and objectives. This half-day seminar is designed to promote a basic understanding of federal acquisition by:

• Describing the principal methods for acquiring supplies and services
• Explaining roles of program and acquisition officials and other key stakeholders involved in the procurement process
• Describing reform initiatives that have significantly reduced acquisition lead times and placed a greater emphasis on achieving sound outcomes.

Administering and Monitoring PBA Contracts

Solutions trains government personnel with a working knowledge of performance-based acquisition to help ensure successful contractor performance in accordance with established metrics, service level agreements and quality assurance plans. This course takes government personnel from contract award through the first base year. The course highlights the differing assumptions related to surveillance of a performance-based versus a conventional services contract, and examines the specific steps needed to implement the quality assurance plan through:

• Ground rules for monitoring performance based contracts
• Understanding of roles and responsibilities
• Roadmap of activities for monitoring contractor work
• Development and implementation of monitoring tools
• Development of checklist/template for monthly validation activity
• Development and analysis of surveys for contractor's customers

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