doing more with less: the sharing economy...

40 Contract Management | July 2014

41Contract Management | July 2014

In our current economy, today’s consum-

ers have become more budget conscious.

However, they want to continue living at or

above the standard of living to which they

have become accustomed. To accomplish

such a feat, many are embracing the “Shar-

ing Economy,” a concept in which con-

sumers and companies seek new creative

opportunities to live less resource-intensive

lives while increasing their quality of life.

The basic premise of this article is that

NCMA chapters have historically followed

the classic consumption model when it

comes to resource-intensive projects at the

chapter level. Whether we’re designing

a course to deliver at one of our monthly

meetings (time intensive) or trying to

develop a new website (time and money

intensive), chapters tend to attempt to

address these challenges on their own. We

believe that the principles underlying the

concept of the “Sharing Economy” are ap-

plicable to NCMA as an organization and can

help us all do what we know we must: Do

more with less.

The term the Sharing Economy is fairly

new and is meant to represent an evolu-

tion of the crowdsourcing model. However,

the thought process behind the Sharing

Economy is not new at all. We often will

lend or borrow tools from our neighbors. If

our garden produces an abundance of fruits

and vegetables, we tend to give the excess

away to our friends, neighbors, and even

strangers. We participate in Neighborhood

Watch programs. We pay local taxes used

to build and maintain common areas such

as public parks. The Sharing Economy takes

DOING MORE WITH LESS: THE SHARING ECONOMY AND CREATING AFFORDABLE NCMA CHAPTER WEBSITES

The classic consumption mentality has been the way we have all traditionally consumed goods and services, whether it be clothing, cars, computer software,

office space, etc. In this model, a person sees a product, purchases that product, and eventually discards the item and moves on to purchasing something else.

42 Contract Management | July 2014

Contract Management | July 2014 43

this premise and expands the potential into

many new creative business models—one of

which is the area of “crowd funding.”

“Crowd funding” is an expansion of the

concept of gathering monetary resources

from multiple investors, which can come in

any dollar amount from the general public.

Two of the most well-known crowd-funding

platforms at the moment are LendingClub.com and Kickstarter.com.

Lending Club is one of the fastest-growing

crowd-funding platforms in the United

States. The website allows consumers to

acquire loans at more competitive rates

than those from traditional banks, no

matter their credit score. On the flip-

side, everyday investors looking for more

lucrative, less risky financial opportunities

outside of the stock exchange are able to

take advantage of funding these loan re-

quests in micro-investments. For example,

if someone requests a $20,000 loan, the

investors can choose to fund any percent-

age of that loan in $25 increments and will

receive a return at the interest rate of the

loan in proportion with the percent that

was invested into the loan. Lending Club

has facilitated over $1.5 billion in loans as

of December 2013 and over $4 billion as

of April 2014.

Kickstarter uses the principles of crowd

funding to help filmmakers, artists, design-

ers, technology companies, and average

folks propose projects and obtain the fund-

ing they need to accomplish their project

objectives. If the Kickstarter.com online

community likes the project, they are able

to donate funds to the project, and if the

project is successful, they will receive a

product or service in return in relation to

the level of funding that was provided. If

the fundraising goal is not met within 60

days, all funds are returned. In the past

two years, Kickstarter has been responsible

for multimillion-dollar successes of many

projects, including the $200,000 Oculus Rift

project that raised over $2 million in 60 days

and was recently acquired by Facebook for

$2 billion in April 2014.

The Sharing Economy and NCMA— The NCMA Boston Website ProjectIn August 2012, the NCMA Boston Chapter

made the decision to invest a significant

amount of time and resources into the design,

development, testing, and deployment of a

new chapter website. Like many other NCMA

chapters, we had been using the SharePoint

site provided by National as our chapter

website. However, we found that SharePoint

really wasn’t ideal for our purposes. When

our board gave approval to obtain quotes and

establish a source selection committee, we

had no idea the process would lead us here.

At the 2013 Mid-Year Leadership Summit in

Las Vegas, Chris Mikaelian of the Boston

Chapter and Nick Traboulay of the Orange

County Chapter discussed the website

development project for the Boston Chapter.

Leveraging Traboulay’s knowledge of the

Sharing Economy, what emerged from these

discussions was an outline of a basic prem-

ise: The Boston Chapter could negotiate

with its developer to establish a set price to

create a “carbon copy” of our site and cus-

tomize it for another chapter. In this model,

the Boston Chapter would make the initial

investment to design, develop, test, and

deliver a content-rich website, and other

chapters could create their own site based

on that design for a fraction of the cost to

develop their own site from scratch.

Why should every chapter that wants a

professional-looking website have to invest

thousands of dollars? Why don’t chapters

spend their resources in a way that allows

other chapters to also reap the benefits?

Through this project, we’re trying to bring

the Sharing Economy to NCMA.

The ProblemAs mentioned previously, the Boston Chapter

had only used the SharePoint site provided

by National as our sole Web presence. While

we agree that SharePoint is a great resource

for document sharing, storage, and re-

trieval, the Boston Chapter wanted a more

outward-facing website.

When developing our design approach,

we considered the following:

� Our SharePoint site could sometimes

be confusing and not user-friendly;

� Our SharePoint site was time-intensive

for routine updates and required train-

ing new users every one to two years;

� Time-intensive maintenance of our

SharePoint site was unreasonable for

the already busy professionals in the

chapter;

� The development of a professional-

looking website can be intimidating,

time consuming, and expensive (well

over $10,000); and

� These kinds of expenditures are not

achievable for many other chapters.

The SolutionThe Boston Chapter worked with its

developer, Windhill Design, Inc., to create

a website with a clean look and a simple

back-end interface based on the WordPress

engine. WordPress is an open-source plat-

form that is extremely easy to use, easily

customizable, and has a large community

of developers creating “bolt-on” applica-

tions that can be integrated into our site.

Because WordPress is so simple, making

updates takes mere minutes and can be eas-

ily managed by the busiest of professionals.

We were also able to customize our website

to interface with our event management/

mailing list provider such that members

could enter their information on our website

and their data would be automatically cap-

tured in our mailing list database. We also

have an e-commerce module that allows

us to sell products through our website.

In addition to the website itself, we also

have the ability to create e-mail accounts

for our chapter leaders using our domain

(e.g., [email protected]), and to

access those accounts via a simple webmail

interface similar to Gmail. The key accom-

plishment, however, is that we were able to

negotiate with our developer to allow us to

make our website template available to any

NCMA chapter at a fraction of the cost to

develop a new site.


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The cost to develop the Boston Chapter’s

new website was not insignificant. The

chapter board of directors approved a bud-

get of up to $12,000, and the actual price

paid was close to that amount. We are of-

fering the use of our site template to other

chapters at a fraction of our investment, as

detailed in FIGURE 1 above.

In addition to providing the site template

itself, we envision a community of support

where the IT chairs from chapters across the

country can ask questions and share best

practices with each other. We envision the

establishment of a LinkedIn sub-group for

this purpose that would be associated with

NCMA National’s LinkedIn presence. The

support offered would be as described in

FIGURE 2 on page 47, with any significant

customizations or changes to be negotiated

directly with Windhill Design.

The whole purpose of this project—aside

from creating an easy to update, content-

rich website—was to demonstrate that the

principles of the Sharing Economy can apply

to NCMA. Our chapters don’t always need

to invest significant resources to achieve our

goals. Through our professional network of

contacts we develop at NCMA events and

conferences, through the great team at

National, and through projects like this one,

Scenario A ($1,000)

Scenario B ($1,200)

Scenario C ($2,000)

Copy the ncmaboston.org website Yes Yes Yes

Host the new site (e.g., ncmaoc.org) Yes Yes Yes

Create a custom banner image to

reflect the unique nature of your chapterYes Yes Yes

Admin accounts in the back-end

interface (WordPress) so that you can

update content and/or create other

user accounts

Yes Yes Yes

Chapter e-mail accounts Yes Yes Yes

E-commerce module (e.g., NCMA Store) No Yes Yes

Developer upload of content into

the website from fully completed

content sheets

No No Yes

FIGURE 1.

we can all work together to make smarter,

more targeted investments of our chapter’s

time, personnel, and money. The East Ten-

nessee Chapter was one of the first chapters

to participate in this experiment when it

was offered, and their experience was a

positive one.

The Customer Experience—from the East Tennessee Chapter’s PerspectiveWhen Landon Hill first saw the Boston

Chapter’s new website and the pitch of

how other chapters could easily create

a similar site for a fraction of the effort

and cost, he decided to present the idea

to the East Tennessee Chapter’s board of

directors. The website the East Tennessee

Chapter presently had was not user-friendly

or aesthetically appealing, and the chap-

ter’s board members were excited about

the idea and quickly gave their approval

for implementing the new site. However,

Hill had no IT or programming experience.

Luckily, other chapters were going through

the same implementation process at that

time that he could learn from.

When Chris Mikaelian of the Boston Chapter

provided the demonstration and explained

the implementation process, he advised

that Nick Traboulay of the Orange County

Chapter had also just recently started the

same website project. Mikaelian explained

that since the East Tennessee Chapter would

essentially be using the Boston Chapter’s

site template, all that had to be done was

to convert the Boston-specific content to

content specific to other chapters, and then

select the background visuals and images

that would represent the individual chapter.

Once Hill got started, the implementation

process was much easier than originally

anticipated. If he had questions, he simply

contacted the Boston or Orange County

Chapters to ask how they solved the issues,

or he could even contact the site developer,

Windhill Design. The most difficult aspect

was waiting on others in the East Tennessee

Chapter to provide information for updating

their section (e.g., bios and pictures,

or information on local open jobs).

The following are a few “lessons learned”

that Hill would share with any chapter

considering starting this project:

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� Shamelessly “borrow” content from

NCMA headquarters or other chapter

sites. Information like “What is NCMA?”

is important and already explained on

the NCMA headquarters website

(www.ncmahq.org).

� Get other members interested by solic-

iting chapter event pictures from the

past to post to the new site.

� Use a document-sharing site like

Google Drive so others in your chapter

can work on editing content with you.

There’s no need to do it all yourself.

� Make a group decision in your chapter

on whether or not to add bios and

pictures of the board members.

� Set firm deadlines when requesting the

chapter-specific content and stick to

the dates.

� You can apply contract and project

management principles to your

website project!

Having other chapters to rely on for guid-

ance gave Hill the confidence he needed

to complete the project and to present the

new website to his chapter within just a few

weeks of starting the project. For a fraction

of the time and cost that other chapters had

already invested, he was able to provide his

chapter with a professional-looking website

that is easy to maintain and looks great.

Support CategoryBy

Project planning documents to capture overall site organization

and page-level content

NCMA Boston

General ad hoc Q&A support LinkedIn Group

Multi-chapter best practices and information sharing LinkedIn Group

Integration with third-party software/systemsWindhill Design

(Developer)

Customizations other than those identified in the pricing Windhill Design

Technical support

Windhill Design

FIGURE 2.

We will be speaking about this topic at the

NCMA Summer Chapter Leader Summit

prior to World Congress in Washington, DC,

this month. Please feel free to contact any

of us, but we hope you’ll join us and share

your experiences of how you’ve helped your

chapter participate in the Sharing Economy

and to do more with less. CM

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

CHRIS MIKAELIAN is a manager of gov-

ernment contracts for Novartis Vaccines in

Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is an honor

graduate of the 2013 Contract Management

Leadership Development Program (CMLDP)

and holds an MBA in corporate finance from

Boston College. He served as the IT chair for

the Boston Chapter of NCMA from 2011–2014

and led the website development project for

the Boston Chapter. He can be reached at

[email protected].

LANDON HILL is a team leader for the Con-

tracts Services division at Oak Ridge National

Laboratory (ORNL) and a 2013 graduate of

NCMA’s CMLDP. His primary focus is the

strategic planning of ORNL’s e-commerce

initiatives, as well as supplier performance

management. He can be contacted at lhill@

ncmaet.com.

NICK TRABOULAY is an MBA graduate of the

Cal Poly Pomona Contracts Management pro-

gram and a graduate of the 2013 CMLDP. He

is a global supply chain engineer for Lockheed

Martin IS&GS Civil, leading IT procurement

and subcontracts activities for the Desktop

Institutional Computing Environment (DICE)

program supporting NASA’s Jet Propulsion

Labs. He can be reached at ntraboulay@

ncmaoc.org.

Send comments about this article to [email protected].

doing more with less: the sharing economy...

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