British Airways and Project management

British Airways and Project management

British Airways and Project management

Introduction

key commercial issues involved in the management of projects

Within the Project Life Cycle, unforeseen issues often arise that result in a delay to project delivery. Whether the issue is that your suppliers haven't delivered on time, technology hasn't performed as expected or you experience equipment faults, you need to put in place a process for resolving project issues quickly and efficiently. (Paul C. Dinsmore et al 2005, 72-124)

Project objectives and a statement of the project scope

The objective of the paper is to inspect the Project management issues in the British airways. Emergn, a specialized consultancy enabling lean and agile principles across the value chain, today announced a series of successful projects with British Airways that have laid the foundation for the airline giant's corporate-wide adoption of lean and agile project management principles. Following project engagements to implement methods for faster, higher-quality web site software development, British Airways has moved forward with emergn to move from waterfall development methodologies to agile methods across multiple areas of the IT estate. emergn's engagement began when British Airways made the decision to find a new method for developing software elements of its web site more quickly and with higher quality. After consulting with emergn's team of experts, the airline industry leader seeded its Air Miles, Revenue Management and Customer Focused Selling groups within the BA.com division with emergn coaches to instil lean and agile project management principles. With emergn's coaches mentoring business and technology team members on using lean and agile principles like user story creation, continuous improvement and retrospective planning, British Airways realized significant productivity gains, higher quality and much shorter ROI lifecycles in the BA.com groups. (Paul C. Dinsmore et al 2005, 72-124)

"We expected these projects to ultimately yield a set of repeatable, standardized processes that would allow us to be more nimble and efficient, (Paul C. Dinsmore et al 2005, 72-124)

but we never realised how fast we would start to see a noticeable, positive effect," (Paul C. Dinsmore et al 2005, 72-124)says Mike Croucher, head of software engineering at British Airways. "The effect on the speed at which benefits can be realised has made a profound difference in the way we now approach projects, and beyond that we see emergn's approach to lean enablement as a scalable way for every part of our IT landscape to become more efficient. The foundation they've laid is helping us to become a self-sustaining agile enterprise."

emergn will continue to support British Airways with agile coaching and mentoring as the company seeks to bring earlier benefit realisation through agile methodologies across the enterprise. With the larger scale nature of the initiative, emergn will help British Airways reshape the processes and behaviours that are crucial for aligning the efforts of IT and business leaders alike to operate effectively in an agile environment. "British Airways' agile adoption is a great example of how these principles, when implemented prudently, can drive the business ...