Sullivan had been in contact with the Gore and Bush teams since August 1999 as associate director of the White House 2001 Project, a privately funded, multi-institutional and nonpartisan effort to smooth the presidential transition.

"It's pretty obvious that a lot of this work has paid off," Sullivan said. "The Bush team has done a really good job."

Sullivan, a presidential scholar, said the Bush transition, even with the setbacks in Florida, was weeks ahead of almost every other president dating back to Richard Nixon.

"Part of it was because they knew they had to and the other part was because they had such good advice," Sullivan said. "What we do have to tell them to do is to get their White House staff in place early, because it is the White House staff that does all the rest of the stuff."

A major lesson was learned in 1993, he said, when Clinton made several of his senior appointments only a week before his inauguration. "It was universally understood to be a disaster," Sullivan said.

To avoid repeating that disaster and the mistakes of other previous presidents, Sullivan and Martha Joynt Kumar, a political science professor at Towson University in Maryland, dreamed up the White House 2001 Project in 1997.

It has two major components: the White House Interview Program and the Presidential Nomination Forms Online Project.

Kumar manages the interview program from her office in Washington, D.C. By conducting some 80 interviews with former White House staff from the past six presidential administrations, Kumar and Sullivan compiled reports of past lessons learned, helpful advice, useful resources and a contact directory for six key offices, from the chief of staff to the press office. The reports were then made available to the incoming administration, along with office descriptions and previously published books written by presidential scholars.

"The problem with presidential transition is getting information about how to govern," Sullivan said. "[The] common characteristics of new presidential staff are arrogance, adrenaline and naivete.

"You move into the White House, and it's absolutely empty," Sullivan said. "There's not a paper clip to be found, and people really suffer from a lack of information and sources."

In addition to the reports, several UNC political science graduate students developed organizational charts showing the structure every six months of the six key offices in the White House since the Carter administration.

"Each president has his own organizational chart, and often times, the organization gets changed multiple times," said graduate student Jennifer Hora. "New officers could see how their offices were previously organized."

Sullivan began work on the program almost two years ago in Chapel Hill by examining the forms required for some 6,000 positions appointed by the president. These appointees must complete forms for multiple agencies, Sullivan said. But since forms must be tailored to each specific agency, the same information has to be filled out over and over again.

The new software allows appointees to enter repetitive information only once, easing the completion of forms. They can then send hard copies to the appropriate government agencies. And should appointees encounter problems with the software, they can contact a toll-free help line, operated by Hora and three other grad students from an office in Chapel Hill.