Contract Number: GS-10F-0130L
Business Size: Small Business
GENERAL SERVICES ADMINISTRATION (GSA)
PROFESSIONAL SERVICES SCHEDULE (PSS - 00CORP)
SIN 874-1 CONSULTATION SERVICES
Where the customer is without a process or has many multiple and overlapping processes, we provide guidance in developing and implementing a process that will work in the customer’s unique environment.
Course tailoring is also a part of our consultation services. We work with the customer, reviewing current processes and current requirement documents. We extract information to modify the course material to directly reflect the customer’s processes and projects. We use real examples to show what is incorrect and how to correct a bad requirement. Most of this effort we do at a firm fixed price.Supports 00CORP.
We provide consultation for "a project" to ensure that good requirements are being used for acquisition. Many government services are directly tied to acquisitions. The FAA promised Congress and the public improved flight control, resulting in fewer aircraft delays and the ability to handle increased traffic. However, its AAS program failed primarily due to very poor requirements resulting from the lack of a requirements definition, management, and control process. The FAA’s more recent programs, smaller and with better requirements, are providing improved traffic handling, though not yet at the speed that Congress and the public desire. Quite often in the government environment, failure of an acquisition is the primary cause for the public’s lack of confidence in the government.
CAI provides feedback to our customers to enable process and productivity improvement. It is not enough to "fix a project". The real need is for continuous improvement in processes and their execution. We aid our customers in setting up metrics to measure where they are and to track their progress. We show them how to define and use metrics and the hazards and loopholes of metrics. We are very proud of the fact that with a minimum investment in us, our customers can achieve a major investment in their own people – we transfer knowledge and skills. The result is a more efficient and cost-effective requirement definition, management, and control process.
By providing select skills and knowledge, at the point in the project life-cycle when they are needed, we can stop the development of poor requirements that can occur for lack of knowledge or just because those close to a project often cannot see the forest for the trees. Because of our long-time business, government, and management experiences, we know just where to look to help our clients avoid these pitfalls. Our consultants work with our customers to help them use and transfer our skills and knowledge into their requirement definition and management processes.
For organizations who have system engineering and requirement definition and management processes, but are not achieving the improvements they want, we audit their processes and their products to find the areas where the most improvement can be made and then help show the customer how to implement these improvements and measure their effectiveness. We analyze customer written requirements and identify missing, ambiguous, and confusing requirements. We document changes to requirements that must be made in order to acquire the product or service that is needed. We identify risk in requirements and assist in writing requirements that provide risk abatement. We make recommendations to modify the customer’s process to avoid similar problems in the future
SIN 874-4 TRAINING SERVICES
We are proud to offer the excellent Requirements Experts training classes from SEIlevel. This is a suite of training services that cover writing and managing requirements across a project life cycle. There is a range of 1 day, 2 day, and 3 day seminars.
The one-day seminars are very effective for just-in-time project training. This means seminars are provided to a project team at the point in time when seminar-specific work is to be performed. These one-day seminars also allow us to go into more detail on each topic. Combining consulting and facilitation with training can further increase the students’ efficiency and aid in improved processes.
The two- and three-day seminars can be used for a project or for a broad audience. This audience may be from many different projects and the projects may be at different points in development. These classes are also very useful for an audience that includes managers, engineers, developers, procurement, IT personnel, testers, users, and other stakeholders. These seminars allow time-constrained customers to obtain the key points of the different phases of the requirements process in less time.
The PBSOW class directly responds to the PSS need for Performance Work Statements (PWS). It is applicable to a PWS for a service as well as for a PWS in conjunction with a product specification.
Government and industry have used this training to improve their project management processes and skills, to obtain higher levels of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM), and in support of ISO 9000. They have used this training in support of multiple programs, for individual projects, and for agency/corporate level strategic planning.
SIN 874-7 PROGRAM INTEGRATION AND PROJECT MANAGEMENT SERVICES
We provide support for your in house team when you need to strengthen your in-house skills and to add additional resources.
We can provide those missing skills to get the product on-line in considerably less time than can the agency we are assisting. We can also help put in place processes that will better enable future upgrades or other efforts of a similar nature. We arrive, do our work, and then are gone. This is better than increasing staffing to do the work and then having to cut staffing or find other work for the people to do. Since this is not the regular work of the agency, it does not need these skills all of the time. Many government organizations need products and services that are not part of their normal operations and skills mix.
For organizations whose job does not include the acquisition, development and deployment of information technology (IT) systems this is a particularly difficult problem. Special knowledge of project management and program integration is needed to effectively and efficiently acquire a new system or make a significant upgrade to an existing system. Many failures of government programs over the last ten years are a result of placing the onus of managing such programs on organizations that do not have the correct skills base.