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We help the US DOD, NATO countries, the defense industry and others build solid Concepts of Operation (CONOPS) for complex systems and for evolving organizations. Our operations experts teach CONOPS-centric courses to project teams and also build turn-key CONOPS for clients. This is our ONLY business! Click the links to the right to learn more. |
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Solid Thinking Corporation is a US Veteran-owned small business with a single passion - - - supporting US and Coalition Warfighters and First Responders! |
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Arrange CONOPS training for your key project teams or let our experienced CONOPS builders develop one for your ongoing project. |
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We offer training courses and consulting services. |
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Of course, we still offer our flagship Three-Day CONOPS Master’s Course. This 3-day immersion in Operating Concepts and CONOPS has been continually updated and refined since STC began teaching it in 2003. It can be taught at your facility, saving your people travel time and your budget travel and lodging money. It requires no background or previous experience in CONOPS development. It is our most popular course, showing how to build and manage CONOPS-development teams, how to interview and work with operational users, how to format and structure CONOPS documents, how to be a good technical writer and much more. And we recently have added a more extensive discussion of CONOPS for complex systems engineering projects. And we have added a "Lessons Learned" collection of failed R&D projects for the science and technology community (with discussions of why they failed - - - it isn't always the technology that was at fault)! |
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To complement the 3-day CONOPS Masters’
Course, we have added three more courses:
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Two-Day CONOPS Practitioner’s Course: In response to students’ requests for a shorter course in these busy times, we have built a 2-day course. First taught in Europe in March 2006, it retains many of the class exercises and CONOPS examples from the 3-day course but shortens the Graphics In CONOPS and the Building the CONOPS Team modules. And the “Robotic Medic” exercise is done as a class instead of in small teams. The major points from the 3-day course are retained but in order to compress the schedule, some slides are provided as hand-outs for review by the student after the course. This two-day course is primarily designed for people who are already accomplished proposal writers, who have a background in DOD or DHS operations and who have written CONOPS before, or who just cannot spare the time to attend the 3-day course.
New Course for Project Managers: PROJECT DOMINANCE: This two-day course is a hard hitting, hands-on class in crafting and leading successful projects in DOD, DHS and commercial environments. Using recent, real-world examples the instructor provides no-nonsense lessons learned and addresses what they DON’T teach at PM schools that can kill your project; pitfalls, technology dead ends, inter-discipline disagreements, technology-induced schedule slips and how to avoid them all; why the contract itself is a threat to collaboration and how to fix that; how PMs can work with engineers and scientists (including a Meyers-Briggs © survey of each attendee) to bring out their best contributions and get the project completed on time; moving from the first project to an established program; how to craft the project as carefully as you craft the system; why some projects are successful while others fail (and a detailed checklist to make your project cancellation-resistant); rules for a productive meeting with the customer; how to keep crucial research and development tasks from derailing the entire project; and working effectively with foreign and domestic teammates.
Consulting: We accept consulting engagements, short or long term, to help you build thorough, actionable CONOPS, hands-on. We can work at your facility (least expensive option for you) or ours. And we can provide assistance on very short notice and at any security classification you require.
STC also licenses to other firms its entire approach to CONOPS. A license can include the ability to use all STC CONOPS templates to build CONOPS for your customers; consulting support from STC for any especially diffcult challenges you encounter in building CONOPS; facilitation of internal or external CONOPS meetings with your clients and partners; immediate access to new CONOPS materials and tools as they are developed at STC (often before they are taught in the courses); the opportunity for your CONOPS pratitioners to teach your clients CONOPS-building techniques alongside STC's instructors; access to STC's Licensee-Only web site full of tips and techniques for building CONOPS, pricing CONOPS efforts, etc.; and if desired, expert help from STC in merging the CONOPS-centric, CONOPS-driven approach with your organization's proprietary R&D, product-development and business development/marketing processes. Call Mack or Cindy for the details.
Note: this option is only available to organizations whose members are graduates of an STC CONOPS course (you otherwise wouldn't know what you are licensing or even what we are talking about!)
This is typical of the emails we get at Solid Thinking each week: "We must have at least 100 people doing CONOPS documents for different Clients and they are all winging it on their own, without any common thought to quality control, and based solely on their limited experience with only one or two Clients and most probably with only one type of organization...we need a central theme when we do these documents and the people that do them need to have broader perspective than just that one Client as well as a sense of what it is going to take to do the Operations and Maintenance of those documents over time." (actual email inquiry, used with permission) |
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Our CONOPS customers say it best: In a recent DOD CONOPS course, 9 of 9 US Navy students, in their anonymous course critiques, said the course material was useful, they now had a better understanding of CONOPS and they would recommend this course to others. One added "The exercises helped convey complex issues clearly". And two students suggested that the course be lengthened to four days because it is packed with so much information (sorry, guys, we haven't been able to do that). |
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Our President, Mack McKinney, with Hunter UAV Unit |
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Solid Thinking Corporation
The CONOPS People™
A Veteran-Owned Small Business
Located near the birthplace of aviation, Kitty Hawk, NC
Solid Thinking Corp.
PO Box 338
Maple, NC 27956
T: 315-420-6593
F: 252-453-6627
www.SolidThinking.org
To E-mail Us Click Here
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