As part of its push toward more efficient acquisitions, the Office of Federal Procurement Policy is looking to train 60 digital IT acquisition specialists by the end of the year.

U.S. Chief Acquisition Officer Anne Rung said in a speech at the March 22 ACT-IAC Acquisition Excellence conference that through a partnership with the U.S. Digital Service, OFPP will graduate 30 digital IT acquisition specialists next month and will train another class before the end of 2016.

"The main focus of the training is how to contract for agile development for IT, and more generally how to manage digital service contracts and how to manage change," she said.

The program, laid out in the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act, or FITARA, directed agencies to develop IT acquisition cadres that OFPP would train in a six-month program for more efficient IT practices.

The first group began its training in November 2015, and Rung said the instruction was designed to import some of the iterative processes that the experts will encounter in developing IT systems today.

"The new training itself mimics the principles of agile software design. In traditional training – as in traditional waterfall development – the curriculum is all developed in advance, before the first class and then rolled out in the course of the training program," she said.

"For this effort, the later modules were developed 'on the fly' based on what had happened in the course earlier on and based on feedback from participants."

The program is part of a slate of procurement policies the Obama administration has rolled out to modernize the federal government's acquisition progress.

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