New OPM course to help managers improve employee engagement

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• The Office of Personnel Management has a new online course to help agency supervisors and managers improve employee engagement and performance. OPM hopes it’s in time to help agencies comply with the performance management requirements in the Office of Management and Budget’s reorganization memo. The course encourages managers to continually talk with their employees about performance goals. (Chief Human Capital Officers Council)

• The market for federal contracting intelligence is getting a bit smaller. Market research and enterprise services firm Deltek is buying rival Onvia for $70 million. Onvia provides public sector businesses with federal, state and local government contracting leads, including RFPs and future spending data. This is at least Deltek’s ninth acquisition since 2010. (Deltek)

• Members of the Senate Banking Committee want the Internal Revenue Service to cancel a contract recently awarded to the credit reporting agency Equifax. The company has been in the news lately for revealing a data breach which affected nearly 150 million Americans. In a letter to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, the senators said Equifax cannot be trusted with sensitive information. (Sen. Jon Tester)

• A big General Services Administration contract has gained a big customer. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is going all in for the OASIS governmentwide professional services vehicles. CMS officials signed a memorandum of understanding with GSA to use both sets of contracts, unrestricted and small business. The unrestricted side of OASIS has 76 contractors. The small business side carries 129 contractors. Together they represent 364 separate contracts. (General Services Administration)

• National Guard leaders want commanders to assume more risk and allow guardsmen to skip potentially unnecessary training. Guardsmen say they are stretched too thin by ancillary training. Sgt. Maj. of the Army Daniel Daily said there’s no time to do all the training required and commanders need to decide what is most important. (Federal News Radio)

• The Army said it’s pushing toward one of its biggest organizational changes in the past 40 years. Army leaders said they intend to stand up a new command in charge of all aspects of how the Army modernizes its equipment by midway through next year. The exact details won’t be ironed out until a newly-appointed task force delivers its recommendations to the secretary of the Army four months from now. But officials said the objective is to consolidate several of the organizations that have a role in acquisition into a single command, with new processes that emphasize feedback from soldiers at the very beginning of the process. (Federal News Radio)

• Federal IT and acquisition executives continue to shuffle chairs. The Homeland Security Department and the Government Publishing Office are getting new IT executives, while the Veterans Affairs Department will need to hire a new acquisition leader. Barry West has accepted a limited-term Senior Executive Service appointment and became acting deputy chief information officer at DHS. Tracee Boxley loses the acting from her title and is now the permanent CIO for GPO. And Greg Giddens is retiring from VA after 37 years of federal service. Giddens has led the Office of Acquisition, Logistics and Construction since 2015 and has been on detail to the Office of Enterprise Integration since April. (Federal News Radio)

• The National Institutes of Health is turning to small businesses for help during flu season. NIH issued a market survey to gauge small businesses’ ability to produce more than 18,000 flu vaccines for employees at its main campus in Bethesda, Maryland. Flu vaccines are mandatory for employees and contractors who come into contact with patients and offered to all employees at the NIH campuses. (FedBizOpps)

• The National Cancer Institute needs a new IT platform for an upcoming cancer study. NCI’s Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics issued a solicitation for a multi-tiered platform to support systems to collect, access, and share data for up to 200,000 patients in the study. (FedBizOpps)

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