The National Air Traffic Service (NATS) is responsible for the safe and timely passage of flights in UK airspace. It faced the double challenge of growing demand for flights through the busiest, most complex, airspace in the world and the prospect of consolidation between European air traffic operators.

Opportunity

In the face of this, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) had approved an investment plan of several hundred million pounds into a simpler network of air traffic control centres, advanced tools for air traffic management and a new suite of core applications that would be more readily compatible with European operators. All this at a time when airlines were demanding lower costs for air traffic services and the CAA was looking to NATS to prove that it can deliver projects on time and to budget.

This left the programme planners at NATS with a headache: how to plan the investment so that each of the aims would be met, when they need to be met, without over investing in any one of them and without incurring an unmanageable level of risk. Air traffic control applications take many years to develop and the airlines would begin to suffer increasingly costly delays if the South East of England did not get the new tools and systems before demand reached predicted levels.

Approach

Paul Gallop, programme architect at NATS, turned to CITI and its Strategy Implementation Planning Process (SIPP) to help resolve the planning headache. Experienced SIPP consultants from CITI helped the team at NATS to revisit the benefits of the programme and to model how and when each would need to happen. By identifying and predicting the scale of impacts on airspace capacity, air traffic productivity and safety, the team could structure and sequence the projects to deliver the benefits against a defined time line.

The team were then helped to link each of the impacts to the programme deliverables so that different scenarios could be tested: for example, if certain new tools were to be introduced to the South East first, what would be the impact on capacity and what would be the benefit for the airlines in terms of avoided cost of delay?

Outcome

The SIPP exercise gave Paul and his team the means to resolve their complex planning issues and monitor progress to plan. It did more than that however, it also left NATS with a powerful approach to model its current and future programmes: focus on the benefits, profile their value over time, determine what changes need to be in place to achieve the benefits, organise and structure their programme and its projects to deliver those changes in the timeframe, and take action to minimise the risks to the benefits.