An Empirical Study of the United States Navy's Management and Oversight of Services Acquisition

Abstract

The Department of Defense is spending an ever-increasing amount on support for the operation of Continental United States (CONUS) installations. The purpose of this MBA project is to provide a comprehensive overview of how service acquisitions are managed for United States Navy installations. This project will discuss the process of gathering empirical data from a web-based survey created from a previous MBA project (Compton & Meinshausen, 2007) that will be distributed as a tasker from the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. This survey was conducted between June and July 2008 and covered 87% of the installations found on the regional commands websites. Also, this MBA project will compare the survey results with the concerns of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in the area of service acquisition management. The results of this research demonstrate that the majority of the contracts issued at Navy installations are competitive, firm fixed-price, and without incentives. The project team approach is used on half of the services contracts awarded for installation services. Additionally, personnel assigned to monitor installation service contracts are only minimally trained, resulting in statements of work and statements of objectives not being generated at the requirements level. The results of this project will be used for further research in the area of improvements to installation service acquisitions.