Adding Value To The Facility Acquisition Process

The federal government, like private corporations and other organizations, acquires buildings and other facilities to support specific functions and missions and the general conduct of its business. The federal government is, in fact, the nation's largest owner of buildings and spends more than $20 billion per year for facility design and construction. Adding Value to the Facility Acquisition Processidentifies a range of best practices and technologies that can be used by federal agencies and other owners to provide adequate management and oversight of design reviews throughout the facility acquisition process.

The federal government, like private corporations and other organizations, acquires buildings and other facilities to support specific functions and missions and the general conduct of its business. The federal government is, in fact, the nation's largest owner of buildings and spends more than $20 billion per year for facility design and construction. Adding Value to the Facility Acquisition Processidentifies a range of best practices and technologies that can be used by federal agencies and other owners to provide adequate management and oversight of design reviews throughout the facility acquisition process.

In the late 1990s, several of the sponsor agencies of the Federal Facilities Council began developing and implementing initiatives and policies related to sustainable development. Guidance related to life-cycle costing and value engineering was recognized as being supportive of sustainable development, in particular when used in the conceptual planning and design phases of acquisition, where decisions are made that substantially effect the ultimate performance of a building over its life cycle. However, specific concerns were raised that when federal agencies apply value engineering in the final stages of design or during construction in response to cost overruns, design features that support sustainable development may be eliminated. The primary objective of this study, therefore, was to develop a framework to show how federal agencies can use value engineering and life-cycle costing to support sustainable development for federal facilities and meet the objectives of Executive Order 13123.

In this study outsourcing is defined as the organizational practice of contracting for services from an external entity while retaining control over assets and oversight of the services being outsourced. In the 1980s, a number of factors led to a renewed interest in outsourcing. For private sector organizations, outsourcing was identified as a strategic component of business process reengineering-an effort to streamline an organization and increase its profitability. In the public sector, growing concern about the federal budget deficit, the continuing long-term fiscal crisis of some large cities, and other factors accelerated the use of privatization measures (including outsourcing for services) as a means of increasing the efficiency of government.

Although most federal facilities projects are successfully completed (i.e., they reasonably meet the agency's requirements and expectations), the perception is that development of the scope of work for design for these projects is challenging and in some cases poorly performed. Based on this perception, a study was commissioned by the Federal Facilities Council (FFC) of the National Research Council to identify the elements that should be included in a scope of work for design to help ensure that the resulting facility is one that supports the fulfillment of a federal agency's program or mission. Its objectives also included identifying key practices for developing effective scopes of work for design involving new construction or major renovation projects and identifying key practices for matching the scope of work with the acquisition strategy, given a range of project delivery systems and contract methods.