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June 2011

Developing Rates for Government Contracts, Part 2
Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Welcome back for Part II!

Last post we discussed the various type of contracts (Firm Fixed Price, Time & Materials, and Cost Plus Fixed Fee) and started to get into what we call indirect cost “pools” – Fringe, Overhead and General & Administrative. For this post, we will delve a bit further into what makes up the “pools”, how they are approved by the government and how you use the pools to develop the price per hour you can charge to the government.

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Implementing a Lightweight Google-Like Search Using .Net
Tuesday, June 14, 2011

One of the requirements for my current project was to implement searching capabilities that were “Google-like”.  When I heard this, I immediately thought about solr, which some colleagues have recommended as an enterprise search engine. And it does look good. However, after reading the description, I realized that this wasn’t a good fit for my application. The main strength of solr is its textual indexing. It is meant to index text documents. The application that I am developing is an image catalog. Each image gets tagged with predefined attributes. Implemented in a relational database, the only connection between the image and the attributes is a linking table. There is no text to index. I also quickly figured out that trying to shoehorn solr for my application would be complex and error prone. 

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Developing Rates for Government Contracts, Part 1
Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Zekiah has been working in the complicated government contracting world for over a decade as a small business. In that time, we have been asked many times by other companies, most of the time new starts ups but sometimes established companies much larger than us, how to develop indirect rates for Cost Plus Fixed Fee (CPFF) contracts. Hopefully this post will give you some idea of how to start the process. I’ll start with reviewing the different types of contracts in this post and then next time we will address budgets and developing your indirect rates.

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