Client Case Study

Building an Agile Foundation for Engineering Excellence

Discover how Project4 helped a global leader in aerospace and power systems become more agile across their entire business.

A global leader in aerospace and power systems embarked on a strategic transformation to become more agile across its entire business, aiming to drive faster and more cost-effective outcomes. A critical component of this initiative was empowering the Engineering, Technology and Safety (ET&S) leadership team. However, the organisation recognised a "mismatch in knowledge and need across the leadership team" regarding agile principles and their practical application.

Project4 Learning Lab was engaged to design and deliver a series of interactive training workshops for the ET&S leadership. Our objective was to bridge this knowledge gap, align the leadership team on which challenges were best suited for agile interventions, and build a shared vision for deploying these new ways of working. Using our 'Release Valve'® mechanism, we structured the engagement to first diagnose the core challenges before introducing the frameworks and leadership habits required to create and sustain momentum.

Proposed Programme

Finding Flow

A workshop to engage a team in identifying barriers to flow within or between selected business processes, to select interventions to address the barriers, to identify key measures to show that the interventions are making a difference, to create a plan to implement first interventions.

Challenges Identified

Rhythm & Blues

Teams planning at different rhythms and different times, leading to significant management overhead and an inability to commit to plans when teams used shared resources.

Flow Fog

A lack of clarity over how work is flowing or status of work (can lead to storytelling, lack of data driven decisions, incorrect focus, which can lead to being predictably late).

Misaligned Priorities

Different teams working on different focus areas (can lead to high waiting time or quickly changing priorities).

Our 4 Step Process

Release Valve ®

1Finding Flow

Finding Flow

The first stage of our engagement focused on a collaborative diagnosis of the current state. Through a series of ‘Finding Flow’ workshops, we worked with approximately 150 members of the extended senior leadership team to create a shared and transparent understanding of the obstacles preventing greater agility.

Polling the teams on their priorities revealed a healthy tension between accountability and speed. While most leaders recognised the importance of delivering value faster, there were notable differences across functions. This highlighted several underlying challenges:

Misaligned Priorities: The differing views on priorities across functions demonstrated a lack of a unified approach, which can lead to teams working on conflicting goals, causing delays and rework.
Flow Fog: A vast and detailed list of knowledge gaps was identified across all leadership teams. These ranged from foundational questions ("What exactly is agile?") to complex integration challenges ("How to connect Agile and waterfall," "How to integrate across a large programme") and cultural hurdles ("How do we change the RR culture of not starting any work without a fully defined scope"). This fog created significant uncertainty about how to proceed.
Rhythm & Blues: Without a common operational drumbeat, teams were planning and executing work on different schedules. This lack of a shared cadence created significant management overhead and made it difficult to synchronise work across interdependent teams.

Results

The training and workshop engagement successfully provided the extended ET&S leadership team with an aligned vision and a practical framework for deploying agile ways of working. The programme established a clear path to addressing the identified knowledge gaps and removing key organisational wastes:

Removal of Defects in Knowledge: The primary outcome was bridging the "mismatch in knowledge" across the leadership team. This directly reduced the waste associated with teams operating with incomplete or inconsistent information, which can lead to flawed decision-making and rework.
A Clear Path to Reducing Waiting: By identifying and making visible the costs of Misaligned Priorities and a lack of a common Rhythm & Blues, the engagement established the "why" for future work on synchronisation. This laid the groundwork for reducing the time teams spend waiting for inputs and decisions from one another.
Improved Focus and Reduced Wasted Motion: Providing clarity on which work types are best suited for Agile versus Lean or Kanban helps the organisation focus its efforts more effectively. This reduces the wasted motion of applying the wrong methodology to a problem, ensuring resources are deployed for maximum impact.

Ultimately, the programme created a shared language for agility across a diverse, global leadership team. It provided them with the clarity and confidence to lead the transformation, moving their functions towards a culture of continuous learning, transparency, and faster, more effective value delivery.

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