Management Levers That Drive Services Contracting Success

Abstract

Contracting for services in the Department of Defense (DoD) has grown over the last 21 years. This growth in dollars spent has brought increased political attention and scrutiny. The DoD has responded to problems such as contract mismanagement and ill-defined requirements by improving service acquisitions, but it still has problems. The problems could be from a lack of standard definition for success. Because contract success and failure is recorded through the Contract Past Performance Assessment Reporting System (CPARS), this information is used for the proxy definition for success. This definition was used to address the following questions: (1) Do the types of services being acquired affect the success of a service contract? (2) Do the contractual amounts affect the success of a service contract? (3) Does the level of competition used affect the success of a service contract? and (4) Does the contract type affect the success of a services contract? This report examined 715 CPARS entries. The findings revealed that contractual amounts and level of competition affect the success of a service contract. The findings also revealed that the failure rate in CPARS is lower than expected. From these findings, the report presents a discussion of the results and managerial implications, and recommends an alternate method in completing CPARS data.