Client – High Tech Complex Systems & Software Business Unit

Brief – The client business was part of a wider enterprise manufacturing extremely complex, safety critical, systems for defence applications worldwide.  The wider enterprise has very many years of experience of designing, manufacturing and supporting their products.  This experience was encapsulated in (among other things) comprehensive and detailed schedules.

Over the years, the level of detailed manufacturing information (up to 50,000 – 100,000 work orders) had become unwieldy and the wider business had just completed the development of a Key Event Schedule (KES) that provided a 500-line summary for leadership monitoring and control purposes

The brief was to support the client in developing KES interfaces between the manufacturer’s schedules and the client’s local schedules.  This was a small but significant part of a much wider PMO support brief.

Contribution – Support the client through multiple site visits with multiple stakeholder engagements at both client sites.  The extensive stakeholder consultation revealed that:

• A relatively small number of critical interfaces were required between the two operational delivery schedules;
• While multiple candidate interface points were identified, there was substantial disagreement on what on the interface points should be;
• The Client did not have an “end to end” view of its business delivery process.  This was significant because the process necessary to deliver materials and supporting data to the manufacturers interface points was not clearly defined.

Taken together these findings necessitated a significant effort to develop and agree a high level definition of the internal “end-to-end” business delivery process that was consistent with the pre-existing detailed delivery processes.  This was required to be undertaken in parallel with defining the schedule interface points.

Outcome – The outcome of the assignment was that a local key event schedule that was capable of being linked to the submarine manufacturer’s schedules was delivered.

Substantial agreement was achieved between senior stakeholders on what the delivery process was and how it operated.

The local client business is well positioned to move forward with formalising the programme interfaces with the overarching manufacturing delivery schedules.