Determining the Value of Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System (CPARS) Narratives for the Acquisition Process

Abstract : The Department of Defense (DoD) has seen unprecedented growth in spending for service contracts since 1990 (Ellman, Livergood, Morrow, & Sanders 2011) during the same period in which there has been a general reduction in the DoD acquisition workforce. The department is attempting to do more with less, year after year. The level of scrutiny focused upon DoD service contracts by the upper echelons of the DoD, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and Congress has increased as the spending on service contracts continues to increase relative to both inflation and the percentage of the entire DoD contracting budget (Hart, Stover & Wilhite, 2013). This project focuses on Army service contracts, specifically the narrative section of contractor performance assessment reports. This project builds upon and advances the research conducted and reported in the Naval Postgraduate School MBA research project Management Levers That Drive Services Contracting Success conducted by Hart et al. (2013), which explored the relationship between CPARS objective scores. This report focuses on the quality of narratives in CPARS and their value to the acquisition process. This report used statistical analysis to examine 715 Army service contractor performance reports in CPARS in order to answer the following questions: (1) To what degree are government contracting professionals submitting to CPARS contractor performance narratives in accordance with the guidelines provided in the CPARS user's manual? (2) What is the added value of the contractor performance narratives beyond the value of the objective scores for performance? (3) What is the statistical relationship between the sentiment contained in the narratives and the objective scores for contractor evaluations?