While the Financial Management Line of Business (FMLOB) looks like it’s making great strides, the Human Resources Line of Business is taking a step back, reports FCW, as it intends to revisit an RFP in light of industry’s mountain of questions. Too often, we see RFPs with poorly-defined requirements, enormous gaps in requirements, and gaping chasms of gotchas that any bidder could teeter into quite easily. With something like a Line of Business procurement, the stakes go about as high as possible (barring manned space flight solicitations) — one wrong phrase in a proposal and a company could be in some scaldingly hot water.

If government didn’t expect the number of questions they received on the HRLOB solicitation, that speaks to poor planning and too-optimistic expectations of industry. The fact is, industry operates on a CYA basis, and we’ll pin down anyone to a finite set of distinct, easily-discernible statements as quickly as we can!