Transforming the UK’s Leading Air Travel and Holiday Brand

Our customer is one of the UK’s largest holiday companies offering carefully chosen hotels, resorts and villas in the most amazing places underpinned by access to the extensive global air travel network of its parent company and wider group, putting them in a unique position to create holiday packages with convenient flights across the globe.

Despite a strong brand position in the UK holiday market, the headwinds of increasing competition of low-cost market entrants, increasing customer expectations and an increasing challenge to update and adapt ageing platforms which underpin the business’s products and services meant there was a need for change to maintain and grow performance. Therefore, a large-scale business technology transformation was required to deliver a new technical platform which could better support their services to meet this changing demand.

The legacy product, sales and servicing platform had been in place for over 15 years and had been highly customised during this time with the result that any changes to the platform came with high development and testing costs on a long lead time but struggled to deliver requisite value, hindering the business’ agility and ability to adapt in the evolving market.

The internal digital delivery capability was in place but recognised a need for organisational transformation to adopt a product centric approach, embracing agile ways of working, to better align and respond to market demand.

After the strategy and target vision work had been completed by the customer, Project One joined their team with the remit to help shape the delivery programme and mobilise the teams for delivery with initial focus on vendor selection and onboarding.

We brought out our extensive Programme and Project Management experience to support the customer and bolster their programme team capability through this process, shaping delivery structures, programme governance and co-ordinating various funding rounds concluding with the full three-year re-platforming business case being signed off at board level.

After supporting the programme owner with selection of a delivery partner best suited for the delivery of the programme, our team worked closely with the selected partner through their onboarding, planning and forward resource model to ensure value for money and effective outcomes were being delivered.

Another part of our remit was developing a delivery and governance model tailored from delivery partner experience, good practice from other group companies and requirements on the customer leadership team. With the long-term aim being that in-house digital teams would take over the running of the Programme in due course, it was important to shape this in such a way that all key stakeholder groups received their required levels of clarity and had opportunities to provide inputs into the programme. Finally, escalation frameworks were established as critical external deliverables were identified and tied into the Programme plan.

An interesting aspect of this technology transformation was how little of the existing system architecture needed to be migrated as part of new platform scope. This enabled our team to challenge SME’s and design teams to focus on target outcomes as opposed to re-engineering existing processes into the new platform. There were no shackles, collectively the programme team could identify and utilise the latest, best available products in the market where justifiably adding value to the programme, and innovative thinking was prevalent across all our workstreams.

Our main challenges included the management of dependencies outside of the immediate organisation, particularly the alignment of other major programmes across the wider group company to the needs of our programme. Additionally, the main software vendor partner had both different and often changing ways of working and expectations which our team had to continually understand and adapt to in joint delivery.

By the end of our 1^st year supporting the programme, we had successfully mobilised, with initial delivery on schedule and underway across design and build. The technology transformation programme scaled up from 3 to 110 team members across 7 delivery teams and the complete business case was signed by the board and the first customer facing services were released 18 months after programme inception and Project One joining to lead the delivery.

A key value-add from Project One, was the Programme running to an established, bespoke, delivery and governance structure taking the required elements and best practice from our delivery partners, other group companies and existing internal structures. This structure was established to provide the targeted autonomy to our delivery squads operating within lightweight, but consistent, guardrails whilst assuring transparency, information and inputs from the customer’s Leadership group (and all stakeholders in between).

We also then supported existing customer team members in moving into the  Programme team and taking over the reins of the new product-centric agile delivery model that had been established. The new model of programme governance established is working well, supported by new tools and connections into other supporting teams across the companies in the group, so that shared value can be attained and further opportunities for both individual growth and collective capability-building can be realised.

Once the programme was up and running, we also bolstered the team with Project One Change Management expertise to support the business in defining Business Readiness plans, uplifting internal capability and scoping the ongoing communications, engagement and training schedules to support the initial platform releases due. This has enabled the organisation to prepare for delivery, monitor progress against the path to live, and grow confidence in its readiness levels to support the technology transformation effort.

Project One value Add

• Strong Programme and Project Management expertise to mobilise a circa £70m transformation programme
• Independent advice provided in the delivery partner RFP phase, onboarding support to assure value for money from partners throughout
• No-ego approach to programme management, focus on best-fit solutions for the client, drawing on industry experience and best practice
• Change Management expertise to develop internal capability and set up teams for readiness roll out and ongoing change support.