Cultivating Speed in Government Contracting with Vince Pecoraro, Lead Program Manager for DAF Digital Transformation Office

Bonnie Evangelista [00:00:18]:
I'm Bonnie with the Chief Digital and AI office. I'm joined by my partner, my colleague, Vince Picarrero from the Digital Transformation office. We're here at Spooks Tech. I almost said spooks. Spook tech 2023. We did a session this morning. What do you think?

Vince Pecoraro [00:00:35]:
I think it went pretty well. The concept of industry taking ownership of the knowledge baseline for how to get on contract was a concept that I don't think most of the industry had thought of. Like, they complain about it a lot, like, man, my contracting officers don't know how to do this. Or I talked to programs they've never heard of, a Silver phase Three. They've never heard of trade one AI. But instead of just complaining about it, if they just accept this fact that people may not know the pathway and start owning it now, there's solutions and there's things that they can come to, and I think that lit up some light bulbs in their brains.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:01:14]:
So our session was ideation to operations in the year of execution. So before I come back to what you just said, what does that mean to you?

Vince Pecoraro [00:01:23]:
That means going quick. If you have an idea, you see something, you want to buy it now, you don't want to buy it in five years. You don't want to buy it when you've talked to 15 different people and all these different offices. You want to be able to execute and get stuff into the hands of the warfighter or whoever's going to be the end user. You won't just want to get it to them quicker.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:01:43]:
Do you think that's possible in our.

Vince Pecoraro [00:01:46]:
Current I know it's possible. Do I think it happens a lot? No, but it's definitely possible.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:01:53]:
All right, so let's go back to the first thing you said. So I think one of the things we were providing some commentary on was around this idea that even though we have a lot of tools in our toolbox and we have authorities out there that can enable us to go fast from an industry perspective, their comment to us was, well, we go to the government and they don't know what to do. And so that's where you were kind of adding some, well, maybe you should help educate us a little bit. Do you think that's too much to ask industry to do for us?

Vince Pecoraro [00:02:27]:
So at the end of the day, industry is the one that's getting paid, right? They're the ones that are hunting for that business, and they should have the responsibility to lower as many barriers to entry that they can. I think that'll help them with sales, help them get their products to the war fighter faster. In an ideal world, the government knows all these things. Every employee in the government operates on a high level. Everyone is super passionate and motivated to do a good job and get things done quickly. And I don't think anyone wakes up and says, like, I'm not going to do those things. I think a lot of people are trying to do those things, but industry has the better incentive to be able to do it and I think are more capable of being able to do it because they can speak to how their specific capability can go on contract much faster. Because here's how it derives from, extends or completes a siber. Phase two. Here's why my trade win video is applicable to your problem set. They know it intimately because it's theirs.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:03:29]:
Yeah. Why can't we just train and educate our workforce on how to do these things?

Vince Pecoraro [00:03:35]:
I mean, this isn't to absolve us of the responsibility to train and educate our acquisition professionals. Absolutely not.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:03:41]:
I'm poking the bear.

Vince Pecoraro [00:03:43]:
Yeah. We are not absolved of that. We should be doing that. But the fact remains not all acquisition professionals are created equal. We all have access to the same training, we all have access to the same tools. By and large, offices do things differently. Different chains, different agencies, have slightly nuanced rules. But the common default of the government person and the culture is like, well, it was done this other way before. If I keep doing it that same way, it should go through because it worked before. Instead of starting from a zero baseline of like it's never been done before. I have to find the pathway. There is no option to copy someone else's way. I have to forge a new path and my tools to forge that path are all the tools in toolbox. It's my sickle, it's my whatever to cut down the trees, my machete. I got to find the path. I have all these tools in the toolbox, all these acquisition authorities. That's what I should be using. That's a cultural shift. It's really hard to do that. You have to have a lot of trust in your employees to allow them to do that. And the moment someone screws up in our government culture, it's like, let's make a rule so they never screw that up again.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:05:03]:
Yeah. One of the things we talked about this morning, in addition to what we were just talking about was on the lines of speed. And we've already said that multiple times. What else do you think it's going to take to go faster?

Vince Pecoraro [00:05:24]:
I mean, people have to want to do it, right? Everyone talks about doing it, but there isn't that burning platform that requires people to do know we're the soft communities here and they do get some of these burning platform kind of requirements and I guarantee you we get them done very quickly. When there's that, it has to actually get done by this thing and COVID. Happened. There was a ton of acquisition stuff that happened. The Air Force and DoD in general led all the other agencies and used a lot of tools to go get stuff out to the workforce or get stuff out to the community faster. Because we had that burning platform. We had the imperative. And that burning platform creates this unique kind of top cover. I can jump rank all the way up, cut all the bureaucracy out, go right to the final decision maker and be like, here's what we're doing. Here's why we're doing it. And the decision maker can either nod their head or just make me the decision maker. They can push that decision down to me to at the lowest level, and we can do it. But culturally, we have to have that burning platform. Should we have to have that? No, we should live our lives with that level of urgency. But if everything's urgent nothing's urgent.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:06:33]:
Yeah. I would call that a forcing function. Do we have built in forcing functions even when you don't have that moment where it has to be done because there's a mission imperative, how are we doing that outside of that? That's very difficult.

Vince Pecoraro [00:06:50]:
Yeah. And when you think about it, everyone's mission is really important. It doesn't matter if you're some special operator going out there to kill Osama bin Laden or you're buying base needs. If you don't have one part of it, it all starts to break apart. You need all the thing. That's why it all exists. But we don't tell ourselves the same stories. If we were to tell ourselves a story of why the thing we're buying is so important and we understood our mission and we got to connect to it differently, I think it would help people feel more urgent about their less sexy requirements.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:07:29]:
So what's yours? I know what it is, but yeah, why talk about it?

Vince Pecoraro [00:07:33]:
I have a lot of whys. I think I might have mentioned this on the other podcast. A long time ago, I worked on a program that was doing some experimentation, and we were flying airplanes around, and one crashed and we lost a pilot. It was a Navy pilot, actually. And a lot of people are like, why was a Navy pilot even working on this Air Force program? Well, when you do cool stuff, it attracts cool people, and they want to come in and be part of it. And we had Navy, we had the Marines, we had Special Operators, this collection of humans that just volunteered to say, hey, I think this is a cool program, project, whatever, let's go do it. But the reason for my project yeah, we were prototyping some military capability, but we were also prototyping a Business Methodology section 804 Authority, middle Tier Acquisition. It was the first one of those going through, and we were trying to prototype how that would work. So I had operators coming to help me putting their lives on the line so I can buy stuff better. And one of them actually died. All right, so I better do a good job, because people are sacrificing, no kidding, their life, so I can buy stuff better. That hits home to me, and that's always been my why since then, because I know I have this weight on me. We have to do it better, have to go faster. We need the stuff that's my why. Hopefully no one else ever has that similar experience. I would never wish it on anybody. It was a really hard thing to go through, but it got me there. Hopefully, people can find a much nicer way to get there.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:09:12]:
Well, I haven't had an experience quite like that by any means at all, but I feel the same urgency that you have coming out of that where I just don't think there's no reason why we have to wait for a catastrophe to get the collective or the system working in a manner that we do have speed.

Vince Pecoraro [00:09:34]:
What was really interesting to me through the catastrophe is I got to live both on the operator side and on the acquisition side of the house. I got to see how these two worlds kind of merged and where their cultures greatly deviated from each other. So on the operator side, when you lose a pilot in the Air Force, you burn a piano, and the Navy has some certain traditions. They have a big bonfire. You drink Jeremiah weed. The Air Force does, like a missing man airplane flyover. There's all this stuff that they do from a cultural perspective to bake that person, that human, into the lore of the aviator that did the thing, put the life on the line, didn't come home by all intents. Like, when you crash an airplane, a mistake was made most likely somewhere along the line, but you don't treat it that way. You lift up the thing, you tell everyone about the story, and you heal as a community. Well, on the acquisition side of the house, which is where I live, normally, I was spending time with these guys on the operational side. But on the acquisition side, we don't do that. We bury it. In fact, the Air Force was afraid to even tell anyone that someone died. I mean, it was angering to me. A bunch of emails, you've heard this story. But ultimately, the Air Force wanted to bury that story, and they didn't want to learn from it. They had an opportunity to go tell the workforce somebody died. So you can buy stuff better. Please buy stuff better. Please go buy we. And that's with every mistake that happens on the acquisition side, we either bury it, or it becomes like, well, I don't want to be like them. I don't want to be like, use a bunch of Air Force examples. I don't want to be like the tanker program, they got protested. So it's not like, why did they get protested or lift up this thing that they did that was innovative, that they tried to do, and they missed the mark. But man, these guys were geniuses for even trying it. That's a culture shift.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:11:32]:
I'll offer another nuance in addition to what you're saying. I totally agree. And you first started talking about how you got to see the operator side of the house. And I feel like us on the tradewinds team, we connect deeply with this. And that's where our best learning started happening, was when we started connecting on the other end of the sphere, as the soft community likes to call it. And we started actually feeling the pain points and the challenges that they were feeling. And that created a level of understanding and language that we didn't have at kind of the base of the spear. And so I feel like there's just this huge disconnect in our system. It's just the way it is. There's no judgment there. But can we get to a place you kind of maybe found it serendipitously because of your project, but can we get to a place where we're not so disconnected from the other, as one of my partners downstairs calls it, divisions of labor in our system?

Vince Pecoraro [00:12:46]:
Yeah. As long as time has been on, acquisition has been going on. We've been saying we need to connect the end user, the guy who's buying it.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:12:56]:
Textbook, right?

Vince Pecoraro [00:12:57]:
It's textbook. It's the course. Go ask the person that's going to use it. That's the person that needs to be satisfied with it. And I think early on, when you have these cross functional teams and you bring in these operational people into your acquisition world, we do it do we do it well, and do we do it in a timely enough manner? Really hard to institutionalize that, because that means that operator is not operating well. They're in your world now.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:13:25]:
Well, this is where creativity, innovation can come in. Like, we're not asking them to sit by us.

Vince Pecoraro [00:13:31]:
We actually do so like B 21, we're developing a new airplane. Designing a new airplane. We actually took maintainers off of the B two platform, brought them into our program office for years to sit with us to make sure we weren't going to make any grave maintenance decisions or decisions that would impact maintenance negatively. Those guys were bunch of enlisted guys who used to turning wrenches, not working with a bunch of white collar acquisition professionals who have water cooler talk. These guys are used to turning wrenches and getting out there in the sweat and in the sun, and it's a culture shock for them. And you guys do what, all day long? And then for us, it's like, man, you have so much knowledge. How do I bake it all in? But then it's so much trade knowledge.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:14:21]:
Like turn the domain expertise married with the institutional.

Vince Pecoraro [00:14:29]:
And that's what we do. Is it the right answer? No, because it doesn't get the right results all the time.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:14:34]:
Well, I think both of us would admit we don't have all the answers, but we have to do something. We have to try something. I think that's what Spook Tech is all about.

Vince Pecoraro [00:14:44]:
So I've gone down this path before. I got to help stand up Afworks, and we did this thing called the Afworks Challenge where we took the entire acquisition process and we turned on its head. We just did the opposite of your traditional pathway. One of the things was how we solicited for items. We told industry, like, hey, solicit at the component level, whatever, you got a piece of the solution, send it in. And we brought all those industry providers together. Once we got all these solutions in and actually helped them network amongst each other, and we made sure operators, the end user of their thing was going to be there too, so they could talk with them, hang out with them, break bread with them. There's alcohol involved. You got to get people loosened up so they can network together. And then from there, they continue to iterate continue to prototype. End user being the one that says, I like this, I don't like this, and having the freedom to just download what their thoughts are to the industry partners that are going to be building this thing. The acquisition guys, at that stage, we were like, kind of in the background. I'm actually indifferent as long as my operators.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:15:47]:
You're just facilitating, right?

Vince Pecoraro [00:15:48]:
Just facilitating, yeah. Right. And then I'm going to put together the vehicle on the back end to make sure that we can go buy this thing. But if I say I'm prototyping helmets, for instance, which is one of the things we did, we get two or three helmets that we go through prototyping. The end user is happy with all of them. Well, that really informs my acquisition strategy.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:16:07]:
Right.

Vince Pecoraro [00:16:07]:
I can just go, lowest price technically acceptable, or a sealed bid, whatever. I already know they're technically acceptable because my end user loves them.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:16:14]:
Yeah. And you've done all the work.

Vince Pecoraro [00:16:16]:
I've done all the work, and I've done all this market research on the front end. So no matter my pathway, I want to do OTS, I want to go farbase. I have a way to go directly to these vendors now. Limited sources, JNA we have pathways to get to the right answer quickly with an informed end user that says, I'm good with either one of these things, and here's why, man, we've done that. But, man, it was a lot of effort. Culturally, it was a shock to the system. I mean, I can't tell you how many times I had a brief like, why this was legal. It's like, yeah, it's market research. Not only is it legal, it's a requirement. And it's one that we kind of don't do very well.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:16:55]:
So that reminds me of when we were in our session and there was similar comments about basically the institutional inertia that people like you have to deal with when you're doing something new or you're out there breaking glass and you said the insurgents are out there.

Vince Pecoraro [00:17:16]:
Yeah, they are. There's a few of us out there, but sometimes we get paid extra.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:17:22]:
Right. So that leads to my question then, is it tying back to your why? How can we encourage others to join the insurgency and to have whatever it is, have courage to take a step and it doesn't have to be maybe shock the system, but they can take steps, right?

Vince Pecoraro [00:17:44]:
They certainly can. I mean, I made some jokes in there that the higher up you are in government or long you've been in government, those kind of people are maybe they're not like your genius players, right? The genius players got sniped off by industry a long time ago. In many cases. Not to disparage all senior leaders, because most senior leaders are great, but the most innovative ones are going to get picked up and industry is going to take them and do great things with them. And the typical person that wants the safe, secure government job, well, that's how they want to live their life. They're not big risk takers generally. So incentivizing them to say, like, I'm going to actually step out and take a risk that's really hard to do because it goes against their nature in many cases. Like they chose this safe government job, we get a paycheck assuming the government passes a budget, don't have a lot of risk of being fired. I could hide behind a desk. Plenty of people do it in the Pentagon, plenty of people do it all over different government jobs where they're just not producing that much. And then there's other people that are doing so much more work, right, if they want to. But it's a few because it's hard and you don't get paid any extra for it. You get fun stuff. You get to do fun stuff like this. But the moment you take the blinders off and you realize, I can make my job whatever I want it to be and gosh, I don't know how much time I have left on this earth, I better be doing something I want to be doing all the time. Not just like when I'm out of work, I should love my job. And you can create this thing that you enjoy doing. Then I think you start to get to a place where you can be creative enough to learn the authorities to go find a different networking group. Yeah, the savvy stuff to really connect.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:19:28]:
And to talk to your stakeholders, like legal. So when legal is pushing back, you can have those candid conversations.

Vince Pecoraro [00:19:35]:
I'm not a contracting officer anymore, as you know. I'm a program manager. Onto the dark side, but I still fully think along the lines of a contracting officer.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:19:46]:
You have to, in my opinion, I.

Vince Pecoraro [00:19:48]:
Have the knowledge set. So it makes it unique when I'm pushing a requirement through the system because I know what the former me would have needed to see to get things done so I can answer questions in that way. Like empathy. Well, it also gives me the BS flag too, because when they're asking me for these things, I'm like, this is why our career field gets a bad name. Because I know this part isn't necessary. I know I don't need to write a million DNS to get an RFP out the door. I don't need that. Maybe I might need one or two of those DNS before I go on contract, but to get my RP out. Come on.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:20:25]:
Okay. Ideation operations in the year of execution. Final tips or thoughts?

Vince Pecoraro [00:20:32]:
If you are a contractor, be the knowledge source. Be the master of how a government organization can get you on contract directly. Ways to cross that competition threshold. Ways to lower the barriers of entry. If that means going on trade when AI and competing that way. If that means leveraging your Siber phase two one or phase two into a phase three. But don't just know that you can do that. Get into the statute, put together the language. And then when you're talking to present the business case, yeah, give them the business case. And here's why. This is a legal pathway. And then when someone pushes back and you got the authorities right in front of you and you're not talking to the contracting person generally, you're probably talking to some end user that wants your thing. That end user takes this they have no knowledge of acquisition generally. They take this sheet and they go to their acquisition professionals like they said, they can get to them this way.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:21:31]:
This pathway I would offer because some people might be taking what you're saying as that's, I don't know, out of place. They shouldn't be doing that. And I would say put all that aside for a second. And if you are that government person who might be in receive mode, just ask questions. They're not telling you to do anything. They're offering knowledge and options, and you get to go investigate and validate what right looks like in your serenity.

Vince Pecoraro [00:22:02]:
99% of the time, industry is your friend. They have the knowledge. They have the thing you want to buy. Sure. Are they trying to make money? Yeah, that's how it works. We need them to make money, in fact. But they're not out to burn you up or to do something shady.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:22:19]:
They're just trying to help, right?

Vince Pecoraro [00:22:20]:
They're just trying to help. They want to provide a good product or service at a fair price, and they want to get it out quickly. And they have real needs as the business, and we need them to succeed. Cash flow being one of them. Like stringing people on with requirements that are never going to materialize because you don't have a pathway to funding, like internal to government, that just hurts them and drains their resources. And if our businesses go away, no one's building it. We don't build anything. Government's not building anything. So we need them to be successful. And there's a lot of things we can do to help that. But I just want to make sure that industry knows they have a role and they are allowed to play that role. It's wise for them to do so on the government side. We have to not be so combative with industry or so fearful of protests or something like these things could happen, bad things could happen. And that's okay. There's more good that will happen if you lean forward.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:23:16]:
Thanks for a take two. I appreciate you having another conversation. It with me.

Vince Pecoraro [00:23:20]:
Yeah, happy to do it in Nashville. Beautiful location. Nice choice.

Bonnie Evangelista [00:23:24]:
Yeah, it was awesome.