Client: Major US based airline

The airline was in the process of a multi-year program to replace their aircraft management suite. The maintenance planning application included in the suite did not meet the requirements of their business model which was not a traditional hub and spoke operation – it was a distributed matrix model. They had been working on trying to customize the product to meet their needs but had failed after two years of effort and they had one year left to find a solution that met FAA requirements.

A small team of consultants were engaged to hold discovery sessions and recommend a path forward. The recommendation was to build an in-house solution on an aggressive with the timeline.

We were very clear to the client leadership that it was critical that they provide a dedicated Product Owner to the project that had decision making authority. A Product Owner was identified and the fun began.

Over the course of the first month we assembled three cross functional agile teams: UI design and implementation team, the API team, and the database/DevOps team.

Requirements were gathered, UI designs were presented and tweaked, stories were written, APIs were designed, developers did their thing and their code was tested. All of these activities, plus some, were closely coordinated and completed in two week iterations. At the end of each iteration an all team demo was presented to the client stakeholders to get early feedback.

The project was completed early and under budget.

Factors that lead to the success of this project, included:

• Each team was co-located in a dedicated conference room for the entire project which engendered a highly collaborative environment.
• The Product Owner was always available.
• Client executives started coming to demos and were excited about what they were seeing which resulted in a close and trusted partnership.

Bumps in the road along the way, included:

• The 737 Max8 was grounded!