Sector - Commercial Aerospace

Project – Leading a £40M Aircraft Customisation Project

Aims - Leading the implementation of best practice Goal Directed Project Management (GDPM) principles in complex, high tech environments, to reduce costs and lead times and improve product and process quality

What was involved?

Project Leader of a hand-picked multi-disciplinary project team, working as a project pilot for a Goal Directed Project Management (GDPM) approach, prior to company-wide implementation within a Simultaneous Engineering change programme…

• The project involved the customisation of 5 x British Airways Advanced Turbo Prop (ATP) aircraft, valued at circa £50M

• All 5 aircraft delivered to initial programme commitment dates, for first time in the 40 aircraft set programme history

  • Previously, all ATP aircraft were many weeks late to customer delivery deadlines, historically incurring massive Customer Late to Delivery Contract claims

• An ‘Observance of Manufacture’ initiative brought the airline Customers closer to the build process, enabling better quality communications and information transfer of real customer requirements

• Quantum changes were made in team based cooperation, clarity of plans, roles, accountabilities, essential communications and set a clear framework for empowering self managing teams

• This GDPM project team performance avoided highly significant late customer delivery charges usually incurred (typically £100,000 - £500,000+)

• Subsequently led the ‘project team learning transfer’ processes, enabling later Customisation teams to adopt GDPM best practices, so that those teams achieved the original customer delivery dates, as standard

• This pioneering GDPM project team implementation was used as a best practice innovation case study, in The Sunday Times Business Innovation video series and achieved international recognition

Subsequently, following the British Airways ATP Customisation Team success…

• Led a pioneering team of internal change agent/facilitators (a UK first) to support widespread implementation of Goal Directed Project Management methodologies, in support of the Simultaneous Engineering (SE) change programme implementation

  • Facilitation team goals included:-

  • Project team start up and mobilisation support services for more effective team working processes, project team performance improvement

  • Applying the GDPM principles at project team working level

  • Reporting key issues and learnings to SE Steering Group senior management sponsorship team

  • Dealing directly with consequences of poor project team and individual team member performance and any failures to adopt the new working practices

  • Dealing directly with change sabotage and blocking attempts across the organisation – previous highly functional organisation models were running with lots of barriers to mutli0-disciplinary teamwork to overcome

  • Implementation of Simultaneous Engineering change programme objectives and GDPM principles, across the BAe Commercial Aircraft Division

• Set up and led a company wide ‘Learn Share Forum’ across British Aerospace plc Divisions, to share performance and change best practices and develop ‘Knowledge Management’ processes for the BAe Group (44,000 employees)