Bringing focus, speed and rigour to a Transformation Portfolio

Our customer, a leading global airline has been bringing people, places and diverse cultures closer together for more than 100 years. Serving the community and planet is at the heart of everything they do.

They have over 100+ years of service, with 30,000 dedicated staff and is flying newer, more fuel-efficient aircrafts.

They are putting sustainability at the heart of their business. From creating a great place for people to work to reducing emissions and waste and contributing to the communities they serve to build a thriving, resilient, responsible business.

Coming out of COVID-19, the airline’s Customer Care team embarked on a three year, £35m business transformation programme to completely overhaul the customer experience. More than 35 individual projects and programmes of work had started, but the processes and procedures to manage such a complex portfolio simply did not exist which is precisely where we came in.

These projects are crucial to improving the airline’s reputation and repositioning it as a leading global airline supporting many areas of customer satisfaction, resolving customer issues quicker and more efficiently and proactively supporting gold-guest list customers.

Given the success of the above we were asked to conduct a short quality assurance exercise on the Airport Vouchers Digital Transformation project which resulted in a series of key recommendations to improve the delivery of the project, management focus, impacted stakeholders and highlight and focus on the massive change impact which would be part of the solution roll out.

We were able to provide the transformation experience and structured programme delivery required to create a streamlined Portfolio Management Office, defining, and embedding the practices needed. We created a single baseline view of the portfolio, defined the portfolio management processes and established effective governance, reporting cadence, and effective ‘decision focused’ senior leadership review boards. Additionally, we carried out a high-level change impact assessment of staff groups across the Customer Care change portfolio and instigated a proper approach to benefits management.

We also supported the implementation of the McKinsey Wave tool, migrating all our reporting and management control to that platform for all transformation programmes. This tool is now used to manage and run all reporting and governance board meetings.

Additionally, we detailed the approach to benefits management and change impact across the wider Customer Care team and simplified the propositions process which enabled the team to be more focused and introduced prioritisation governance. Support was also provided to the financial planning cycles.

To ensure ongoing success, we supported to recruit a permanent PMO lead to maintain the function that we have created, and we effected a successful onboard and handover.

The impact to the Customer Care team has been enormous. For the first time all transformation projects are managed and visible from a portfolio perspective allowing the leadership team to make the right decisions on priority and focus to best serve customers.

Delivery of these projects will enable a much better customer experience and a speedier resolution of customer issues delivered via proactive customer care (where issues are spotted in advance of the customer such as broken seats, flight delays etc) and active engagement with the customer enables a much happier resolution thus improving CSAT scores. Where Customers do need to call engagement centres then new technologies like AI will enable the agents to solve problems and provide ‘first contact resolution’ thus speeding up the process and improving satisfaction.

We have left the Customer Care team with the ability to properly manage their transformation, with effective controls, established reporting processes, decision making boards, and the focus and mechanisms for prioritising the right initiatives.

The quality assurance exercise on the Airport Vouchers Digital Transformation project provided the Programme Director with an unbiased state of the nation review of the project with key recommendations in areas which simply were not focused enough to provide the right outcomes. Recommendations included strengthening the project management, scope of the solution and the delivery of the project, management focus and governance, managing stakeholders, and highlighting the focus required on the massive change impact of the solution roll out.

The Project One value add:

• To provide rigour and pace
• To set up effective portfolio management
• To introduces the right processes and decision-focused management boards
• To improve the quality of reporting and instigation of new initiatives
• To provide innovation in thinking, different ways of addressing problem solving, creating clarity and structure.

Do you need change expertise?

If you are struggling to understand your transformation investment, the state of your transformation initiatives or simply struggling to put the right processes in place to prioritise your portfolio investment the come and talk to Project One.

theteam@projectone.com