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.
QuickStart®

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.