QuickStart®
QuickStart® Helps You Take the Lead
The Challenge
The first ninety days set the tone for any new program. The challenge facing all program managers is meeting the demands of an aggressive schedule while ramping up an organization. Building customer confidence requires the team to produce results and establish a strong tempo from day one. The consequences of failure can be significant and difficult to correct downstream. The key to overcoming these challenges is to start early and aggressively attack the risks that can cripple the transition from proposal to program.The focus on transition must begin during proposal development and rapidly pick up speed in the normal dead time between proposal submittal and contract award. The momentum gained during this phase will carry into the program and help ensure that early milestones and critical deliverables meet the customer’s high expectations. One of the best indicators of success is the speed that the team gets out of the blocks…
SMA Transition Assessment
Over the past 35+ years, we identified 12 areas of risk that are critical to transition success. We conduct a detailed assessment of these risks immediately after proposal submittal. Our outbrief to your team assigns a risk level to each of the 12 risk areas and provides recommendations to mitigate these risks going forward. The transition risk assessment identifies specific actions for implementation prior to contract award to dramatically improve your performance during program startup.| Risk Area | Risk |
|---|---|
| Allocation of Verifiable Requirements: Validate ability of allocated requirements to be verified at delivery | |
| Infrastructure Readiness: Define up-front strategy & requirements for program infrastructure | |
| Coordinated Program Execution Processes: Ensure plans and processes of all teammates are adequate & consistent | |
| Program Status Review Approach: Plan & establish requirements for periodic reviews with internal & external customers | |
| Subcontractor Selection and Integration: Conduct source selections for key suppliers/vendors & integrate them into team | |
| Program Onboarding Plan: Develop onboarding plan for training new employees at all tiers of organization |
| Risk Area | Risk |
|---|---|
| Standing Up the Organization: Ensure adequate resources are identified & available for near-team program needs | |
| Risk Tracking and Mitigation Planning: Establish risk tracking system & implement mitigation activities defined in proposal | |
| Top-Down Metric Architecture: Define metrics to support internal & external measurement of program progress | |
| Award Fee Plan: Finalize award fee plan, set customer expectations & establish action plan | |
| Integrated Master Schedule to Earned Value Management Transition: Establish fully-integrated cost & schedule baseline | |
| Early Milestone Success: Early start on preparing for critical program milestones & customer reviews |
QuickStart® Implementation
For each of the twelve transition risk areas, the SMA QuickStart® solution offers a disciplined and structured process to drive the risk to low. Our seasoned team of QuickStart® specialists can respond quickly to your needs and implement a plan tailored to your unique situation.
Supporting High Profile Programs
SMA has successfully implemented our QuickStart® solution on some of the most significant programs in US history. On each program, our QuickStart® team dramatically reduced transition risk through:
- Early preparation of customer review packages
- Develop highly-integrated program baselines
- Focus communication with key customer decision makers
- Disciplined capability ramp up driven by program priorities
Our experience in proposal development, program management and customer communications on 3,000+ proposals and 200+ programs provides SMA a comprehensive understanding of the challenges associated with the critical proposal to program transition. We understand that the decisions and processes made, or not made, during the transition period can impact performance and profitability for the rest of the program. Our QuickStart® solution provides the process, people and leadership to mitigate transition risk.