Agile development of aircraft sections
In order to meet market expectations swiftly in terms of performance and costs, this leader in the aeronautics sector has decided to push the modularity of structural elements of its aircraft through an Agile approach.
“ Bureaucratic locks have been built up over time, by accumulating successive levels. We need to identify them in order to make our organization more agile”
Context
The increasingly competitive aeronautics environment in a context of global air transport growth requires major manufacturers to continuously improve their products while significantly increasing production rates. This challenge is not so much a response to a desire to increase its dominant position on the market, but rather a need to push new technologies in order to try to maintain its very leadership position.
Approach
After a framework with the client to define the ambition and vision of the project, Mews Partners was asked to adapt the agile approach initially designed for software development to the world of complex products and systems. The consultants worked with a business team to define the new roles in the agile team, ensure the development of skills, initialize the backlog of activities to be performed, lead the first agile rituals to gradually empower the team in a new agile operation that became natural.
Mews Partners consultants began by supporting the business teams and then implemented synchronization between these teams, all working on the same modular aircraft structure product.
Results
The new modular structural concept developed iteratively and incrementally, has reached such a level of maturity that it has been integrated into several aircraft families. This agile approach has allowed a better alignment of teams with the project ambitions, a real awareness of dependencies between teams and a better management of its interfaces.
The development of new technologies never qualified nor implemented on aeronautical products was conducted in regular coordination with aircraft programs, allowing the company to fully play their role as internal customers, in a fully integrated manner in real time from the concept phase to the test and qualification phase.
