I've often been asked ...

Most people's first spoken reaction to seeing the Guam Procurement Process Primer is "why did you write this?".

Yeah. Of all things. And to then just give it away.

After all, as I wrote in the Primer,

The author makes no claim to great authority of the subject. He acknowledges willingly that procurement law has been seen to be impenetrably obtuse, stultifyingly boring, and an aggravation to government and private business alike.

Well, in the first place, it could not and would not have been done had it not been for the encouragement of my boss, mentor and friend for almost three decades, Ken Jones. He basically set me free to "clean up this mess."

But I didn't have an idea in mind for doing so until, after delivering a lecture to the Guam Chamber of Commerce's Small Business Committee on procurement law, I found myself in possession of an outline of sorts, and numerous memoranda I had written for myself to deal with the many topics that come up in a procurement protest, when time is short to organize and research.

And then came the challenge. Hammering out details of a settlement of one such procurement dispute with a sympathetic but hard nosed Assistant Attorney General, he asked why was I being so persevering. And I said, because I hoped to get everyone on the same page as to what the law requires so that we don't have to spend so many protests and appeals challenging procurement lore with procurement law.

And he said, with no malice or antagonism, "good luck".

That's the short, prosaic story. The following is more descriptive.

One man's plan to change public procurement by Janjeera Hail

Guam - With the botched John F. Kennedy High School contract dominating headlines, a huge blow has been dealt to public confidence in the Government of Guam's procurement process. With the release of the 2nd Edition of his Guam Procurement Process Primer, John Brown hopes to bring some clarity to local procurement, a process that, time and again, has cost the local community valuable time and money.

After struggling with it himself and finding that many of his colleagues felt the same, he wanted to do something that would bring everyone on the same page. He was approached by the Guam Chamber of Commerce about delivering a lecture, and the Guam Procurement Process Primer was born. "It would be my goal to get everybody on Guam on the same page so we all understood what the law was or pretty much was. And then we could just argue the facts, which is what lawyers tend to do. And that would cut down on a lot of the unnecessary disputes," he explained.

The first version of the Primer was in the form of the first lecture outline. Those 30 pages have grown to nearly 300 hundred in the most recent version. "There's a lot of 'inside baseball knowledge' that lawyers need to know," Brown quipped. "Unfortunately some of that gets kind of technical, but there's a lot of that spoken to in the latest edition."

In the 1980s, Guam adopted the American Bar Association's Model Procurement Code, but left out two parts Brown believes should have been included. The first was a procurement institute, of which Brown said, "[It's] intended to be a place of learning for both the private and public sector and it's not necessarily a place in the sense of bricks and mortar. It's a curricula that could be combined with a UOG course or a GCC course."

The second would be a council - with no independent authority - but the ability to bring knowledge to bear on a problem and recommend solutions. "The advisory council was to be composed of people who really knew what they were talking about who could assimilate the various viewpoints of private-public sector participants on issues of procurement policy and make recommendations to the policy board," he said.

You can also see the video here. (I hope the link works.)