Background

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The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) is a regulatory body that is responsible for ensuring that everyone involved in New Zealand aviation meets the legal standards set by the Ministry of Transport. Year on year they have a number of initiatives on the go however, they lacked the mechanisms to track and have line of sight to the cumulative impact of these initiatives on both staff and the organisation.
 

The problem lay in the inability to effectively identify, measure, and manage the demands that initiatives place on the managers and employees who were expected to do the work.
 

Embedding the practice of strategic business planning, gives leaders and managers a line of sight into their own group's initiatives and priorities, as well as a view of other groups' activities. This helps with understanding the impact on neighbouring functions and teams. More importantly, CAA then has visibility of both the people and change impact and can make decisions to stop initiatives that are detrimental to people's workloads and not aligned to the overall strategic direction of CAA.

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My role

 

To design the business plan practice for CAA, increase the visibility of the work programmes, highlight the state of maturity, and overall, embed business planning as an enterprise function.

 

Step 1 - Getting started

 

The first step was to make sense of how the CAA operated when it came to delivering both its core functions and new initiatives. CAA is made up of teams that focus on aviation safety, security, policy and corporate services. As a result, each area has different ways of working and it was important that we got to the nub of the problem that was reducing the business' planning effectiveness.

 

Step 2 - Too many Initiatives

 

What we discovered was a high number of initiatives that were being undertaken across the organisation, by multiple teams with little alignment and understanding of the broader impact. We saw that the lack of planning and strategic intent with new initiatives meant that there were no formal ways to say no to something new. Often there was a reliance on other teams to help deliver the initiatives but no way of making sure that everyone was on the same page. This often had a detrimental impact on staff workloads and capacity to deliver their core work.

 

Step 3 - Assessing the impact

 

This stage focused on showing the cumulative impact of the current workload. This involved working with teams to gather information on all current work and then being able to understand the current state.

 

We presented this to the Leadership team to make a case for putting in place a rigorous business planning approach to better manage the workload. Following approval, we began the process of designing the platforms, processes and systems which would capture and report on the current state with recommendations on how best to alleviate the issues.

 

Step 4 - Embedding business planning

 

Having designed and built the platforms we used existing applications like SharePoint to capture the data and Power Bi to build dashboards. Managers would then be able see what the state of the work that their teams are involved in across the organisation. We worked closely with each team to help them understand how to prioritise their work and to make decisions on when work would start.

 

We also focused on putting in natural bottlenecks into the process to slow down the pipeline of work so teams could get ahead. This involved upfront scoping of work to get all of the information needed before an initiative progresses.

 

Step 5 - Strategic priorities

 

While we worked with managers, we also ran workshops with the Leadership team to determine the priorities for the Authority in the short and medium term.  We went from 44 to 15 areas that were agreed to be high in priority.

 

Step 6 - Ongoing work

 

Having established business planning as a practice, work continues to refine the function as well as build capability amongst managers. We have also shifted to focusing on the longer term strategy for the Authority and each group to help inform the business planning.  A 3 year roadmap and maturity plan has been developed to provide the direction. 

 

Outcome

The CAA leadership team now truly understand the initiatives that are in place and/or planned across the organisation and are engaged in a process to critically think about their viability in light of the strategic direction of CAA.

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They now understand how visibility is beneficial to the design of the strategic framework and long term direction.  It provides the basis for questioning whether the work undertaken across the organisation is aligned with its strategic intent.

An EPMO was also established to help with the delivery of project based initiatives.

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Lastly, management has the information to prioritise the work that should be happening within their teams and be able to better support people with what they should be focused on.

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What was delivered

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• Establishment of enterprise business planning function and practice

• Establishment of the Enterprise Portfolio Management office

• Governance and assurance groups to provide oversight

• Power BI dashboards to provide reporting capability

• Digitised business planning platforms using sharepoint lists

• Capability and customer journey maps