Mr. Sharma is the founder of the Federal Acquisition Innovation and Reform Institute, a Visiting Fellow at the Center for American Progress, and Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Censeo Consulting Group. Much of his work is focused on driving large-scale efficiencies, reducing costs, and improving the overall effectiveness of the federal agencies through the application of proven commercial and public-sector best practices.

Mr. Sharma is the founder of the Federal Acquisition Innovation and Reform Institute, a Visiting Fellow at the Center for American Progress, and Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Censeo Consulting Group. Much of his work is focused on driving large-scale efficiencies, reducing costs, and improving the overall effectiveness of the federal agencies through the application of proven commercial and public-sector best practices.

To better illustrate the path from tactical to strategic management of energy, let’s jump right into it, using the same scenario as yesterday: Situation: Budget Deficit Mission: Develop Fiscal Sustainability Goal: Cut Operating Expenses across Agency Facilities Objective: Reduce Total Energy Consumption  

What Does it Mean to Have a Strategy or Plan? Strategy is defined as the art and science of devising or employing plans toward a goal.  In this context, we can assume that an organization’s goals typically include providing useful products or services to customers in a financially sound way that is sustainable over time.  A plan is defined as a detailed formulation of a program of action or an orderly arrangement of parts of an overall design.

Taking the Guess Work Out of Identifying Excess Inventory

“Snowflakes are one of nature’s most fragile things, but just look what they can do when they stick together.” -- Vesta M. Kelly, Author Like visibility, the positive impact of collaboration is well known. And, when applied consistently to the Federal Government’s inventory management system, it is a tremendously effective cost-saving tool, by creating a more accurate forecasting and replenishing process.

How do we do this? We believe that continuous inventory management improvement is critical, and it is based on three guiding principles: Visibility Collaboration Optimization We’ll use this post to describe the first principle of “Visibility.”     “You Cannot Control That Which You Cannot See”

Why the Peanut Butter Approach Doesn’t Work Sure, when making a peanut butter sandwich, we want the peanut butter spread evenly across every corner of the bread. The distribution is equal, and every bite tastes the same. But if you apply the same tactic as an inventory cost-reduction strategy to all areas of a large organization, the results will be inadequate item availability and a decline in customer service. That’s why the needs, productivity, and capacities of different departments have to be analyzed before taking broad inventory reduction actions.

Procurement reform is nothing new.  Remember when Vice President Al Gore smashed that ashtray on television as he was launching the Reinventing Government campaign?  That was 1993.  Plenty of good things have occurred in the world of Federal procurement reform in the years since.  Yet we still struggle with the same challenge: making sure that the government and more importantly the taxpayers get the maximum bang for their buck.

If there's one thing all politicians can agree on cutting, it's fraud. Locating fraud can be difficult, though, as fraudsters’ behaviors can disappear among millions of other data points. Plus, with tight budgets, governments are hesitant to invest in fraud-spotting efforts even if they have high returns.