Do you sometimes feel like everyone's on a different page? Is your leadership focused in one direction and your contracting office moving in another? Are you delivering nails when the program office needs a hammer? If so, you are likely facing an alignment problem.

Alignment is about developing shared understanding and commitment to a goal, outcome, or way of doing things. When leaders and stakeholders are aligned on outcomes things are smooth, efficient and effective. Without alignment, getting things done requires slogging through mud or pushing a boulder up a hill. Alignment yields synergy and high performance, transcending competing positions and agendas.

Getting aligned starts with identifying all parties with an interest in the acquisition process, assessing their level of influence, and engaging them appropriately from the outset in the conversation about key process objectives and desired outcomes. Typical acquisition stakeholders include agency leadership, overseers, operational management, program management, contracting officers, finance offices, the user community, industry and others for whom the acquisition process or outcome will have an effect. For a specific program or contract, stakeholders extend beyond the contracting officer and program manager to ensure that the program executive, users, the contractor, administrators and beneficiaries are involved in decision making and therefore accountable for success of the acquisition.

Maintaining alignment comes with establishing a governance structure to set priorities and make decisions at key intervals in the acquisition life cycle. The governance structure includes the program officials responsible for cost, schedule, and technical issues, as well as the warranted contracting officials with FAR responsibilities. Their counterparts in the contractor's organization should also be included. The governance process ought to provide for representation of or at least input from other key stakeholder groups. Setting up governance involves defining the respective roles and responsibilities for participants, implementing a communications process, articulating fundamental criteria for making decisions and getting commitment to abide by the decisions of designated governance body against those criteria.