Programme Acceleration Hub (Manufacturing)

Using a Transformation Hub at the heart of a highly complex organisation

The Engagement

From design to delivery, to accelerate a new aircraft programme:

• -Align diverse teams of stakeholders from across the organisation against a common vision and objectives.

• -Ensure robust, enduring decision-making throughout the programme.

• -Bring cultural change into the organisation.

• -Shorten decision-making cycles, and breakdown organisational silos.

• -Deliver results on both business-line specific and transverse change.

The Complexity

The programme for the development, deployment and support of a brand new aircraft affected more than 5000 daily users across a large, highly complex, international organisation, and would last five years. Pressures on both cost and time were unprecedented. Timescales were ambitious and every day of delay would have significant financial implications.

Design and Delivery

Our Designers delivered an average of two WorkSessions per week, and often had up to ten WorkSessions in preparation on different topics and for different parts of the programme. Each session was bespoke and co-designed over 3-4 weeks with different sponsor teams.

Working continuously with the same sponsors and participants over several years meant our Designers had to design new approaches every week in order to keep each experience fresh and effective.

Two Project Managers provided both organisational and content expertise to the on-site team.

The custom-made environment was both attractive and effective and, as well as being a delivery facility, also quickly became the place to come and talk – a hub in every sense of the word.

By working repeatedly across different parts of the project our Designers were able to identify conflicts and synergies beyond the original remit and facilitate the bringing of different parts of the organisation together to resolve issues and exploit opportunities.

Results

In the first year around 100 sessions were run in the unique collaborative environment installed at the heart of the programme management office, on an inter-departmental platform, bringing both highly tangible and intangible results:

• New, effective cross-functional team mobilisation – breaking down of functional and country silos.

• Transforming and embedding new ways of working.

• Convergence between aircraft programmes.

• Action plans, solutions to burning issues, contents of communication documents, optimised processes, detailed schedules, progress tracking.

• Convergence, understanding, awareness, alignment.

• A living steering dashboard: hub priorities mirror those of the programme.

• Real time feedback from teams to management.

• A permanent stream of collaboration.

• After three years, as trusted partners of the programme management, and as the development was ramping down ready for production, our facilitators were asked to shift focus to another transformation programme (a simplification programme on a different aircraft) and two years after that to a third, highly complex transformation across engineering in all aircraft programmes.

Deliverables

• Each of the hundreds of bespoke sessions delivered received hard copy outputs and a digital file-structure.

• An ongoing programme/topic pipeline, and interdependence schema.

• Punctual communications messaging.

• Regular review sessions with our key sponsors to constantly assess performance and raise the bar going forwards.

“In five weeks we have accomplished more than we could have done in five months. This way of working has become a way of life.” -Programme Lead