Senior Leaders Should Use Leading Companies’ Key Practices to Improve Performance

Abstract

Each year, federal agencies spend over $500 billion to buy a wide variety of products and services, ranging from cutting-edge military aircraft to common office supplies. Given the federal funds spent and the missions these contracts support, it is critical that agencies’ procurement leaders manage their organizations effectively. GAO found procurement leaders at six of the federal government’s largest agencies did not consistently use key practices that leading companies use to improve the performance of their procurement organizations. For example, only the procurement leaders at NASA collaborated with end users when developing performance metrics. Corporate procurement leaders told GAO that collaboration with end users during the development and implementation of performance metrics increases coordination and improves performance at the strategic level. Additionally, GAO found procurement leaders at most of the agencies reviewed had ongoing or planned efforts to use performance metrics to measure at least one of the four procurement outcomes identified as important by corporate procurement leaders: (1) cost savings/avoidance, (2) timeliness of deliveries, (3) quality of deliverables, and (4) end-user satisfaction. However, all of the leaders had work to do to fully implement metrics measuring these outcomes. The original GAO report is accessible at www.gao.gov/products/gao-21-491.