Our Story
We are a team of operations-experienced technical leaders and CONOPS builders who specialize in translating customer's needs into products and services.
Our instructors are subject matter experts in requirements management, critical thinking, and systems engineering. We teach courses for defense, civilians and uniformed military, contractors, and for commercial clients.
We originated the Technical CONOPS as a way to ensure users' real needs are reflected in mission-critical systems, requirements are captured and managed, and the entire systems development process is smooth and low-stress for all concerned. This is the mission of Smooth Projects: user-reponsive systems, delivered faster, at lower costs, without burning-out our most precious asset - - - our people!
Our clients include: General Dynamics, Raytheon Missile Systems and Space and Airborne Systems, Boeing Phantom Works, Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, MITRE, Booze Allen Hamilton, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Sikorsky, General Dynamics, Joint Forces Command, U.S. Navy Cyber Command, Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), US Air Force Air Combat Command, DARPA, and the governments of Italy, UAE, Denmark, Hungary and Sweden.
What makes SMOOTH PROJECTS' training approach different? A culture-changing central theme and then three unique training approaches. Our prime directive and central theme is "design and build for the users". And that requires an understanding of all four user groups and the various other stakeholders who impact systems development efforts. It necessitates the use of representative personas to help tailor and fine-tune systems attributes. And we use a touchstone, a framework, to hold everything together as systems progress from concept through design, agile development, test and deployment: that touchstone is the Technical CONOPS approach.
We use three training techniques, each of which is increasingly rare:
1. Our instructors have "walked-the-walk" as both US Government users of complex systems and as contractors who have actually built complicated systems.
2. We use real-world examples, recent case studies and current lessons learned (not just academic concepts).
3. We teach only proven techniques that have been updated and that work seamlessly with DevSecOps, Model Based Systems Engineering and other branches of Digital Engineering.
