Carl Salzano is a Booz Allen vice president who helps provide full life cycle acquisition support to client teams. Here’s his take on the current contracts environment:

ExecutiveBiz: How are you responding to the shift toward fixed price contracts?

Carl Salzano: We spend less time these days, in my department in particular, negotiating the minutia around specific terms and conditions. We place a lot of emphasis on understanding the totality of the problem. What is the client trying to solve?  What’s the environment they are trying to solve it in? Who are all of the stakeholders? If we are tackling a tough problem, we need to bring up any issues early so our client doesn’t have surprises. That’s the rule of thumb for me: I don’t want surprises, my boss doesn’t want surprises, and my clients don’t want surprises.

ExecutiveBiz: How do you promote transparency?

Carl Salzano: In today’s contracting environment you have to be very careful not to have a sequestered set of discussions. We have regular staff updates that include all stakeholders, including technical representatives and contracting officers. Beyond that, fortunately, through much of our technological efforts, much of the information we need is real time. If you take a job, for instance, that has a value management component to it, we’ll know exactly where expenditures are down to the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) level.

ExecutiveBiz: How, if at all, is the current insourcing discussion affecting your overall approach to new business pricing and strategy?

Carl Salzano: With insourcing, some of our clients have expressed a need to rebuild technical capabilities in certain aspects of operations that we run. We are supportive of that as long as it is well thought out and it’s not just some sort of decree that 10 percent of something has to go here; we are looking for these decisions to be surgical rather than hitting with a big stick. All that said, I wouldn’t say we are taking any dramatic departures from our current strategy; we are going after those things we know how to do well.

ExecutiveBiz: Turning to competition for talent. How are you addressing that?

Carl Salzano: First, let me say: There is an environment, potentially, where people are viewing the government and contractors as polarized. We view it differently; we view our success, going forward, as relying on partnership and transparency. As for talent recruitment, if you look at the well-advertised need for more cyber security, you see a limited pool in the traditional geographic labor market. Instead of bidding up the labor here, we are talking about going to Denver, San Francisco, and Colorado Springs, for example, and allowing talent there to deliver remotely in a network environment, with the right facilities.

ExecutiveBiz: What fundamentals do contracts executives need to navigate the current environment?

Carl Salzano: One is to have a strategy and ensure that that strategy gets you out in front of issues so you’re not reacting; you actually have an opportunity to shape the discussion. Two, go for quality growth and stick to the things that you are good at; I see a lot of firms and departments get in trouble when they stray from their competencies. Three, build relationships not just with internal clients but with external clients also.

ExecutiveBiz: On the relationship piece, how do you go about that?

Carl Salzano: It’s easy in the contracting world to get bogged down in the day-to-day transactions, putting out fires. We line our contracts people up by our markets and ensure that they get out and share their ideas and have open dialogue and communication on contracting strategy and procurements. It enhances their understanding of the technical delivery of the work.  It enhances the ability of people to interact in a more relaxed and informal way when you can put a face with a name.

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