Any airport contains its own community, much like a small city. The teams of people working in such a fast-paced environment, whether they are airlines, ground handlers, retailers, security or management, have to work well together in order to achieve their goals and passenger satisfaction.
We often work alongside clients and stakeholders in airports. These many groups always have different viewpoints and priorities, and it is important to gain a consensus on each project to ensure that everyone works as a team and fully understand the implications of the design or change.
Our process model uses four clear steps to manage projects:
- We diagnose problems and issues
- Develop creative, efficient solutions
- Implement those solutions
- And see the projects through to live operation.
Effectively managing a project means engaging with all stakeholders to ensure buy-in and making sure there are clear communications throughout all four of the steps. Skills in stakeholder management are crucial to the process model, and it’s not just giving and receiving orders. You often need to be the ‘go-between’, speaking with different emphasis for different groups.
“I act as a translator between technical people such as architects and builders, and those that are using and buying the service or operation. Our clients know what they want but not what it looks like, and specialists don’t necessarily have first hand experience of using it.” Graeme Thom, Senior Consultant.
Getting consensus quickly, both for clients and stakeholders, is a great advantage to providing smooth operations when diagnosing a problem, developing a solution and implementing it. You need to work with clients, operators, and suppliers to manage such change in a proactive manner. As well as the obvious meetings, this can include presentations, one to ones, training and workshops. Ensuring full engagement and consensus with all stakeholders is critical.
“Working in a live airport environment where I’m interacting with all types of stakeholder – operations, airlines, ground handlers, control authorities, and more. Every time I’m out in the airport I still find it fascinating, exciting, simulating. It’s a bizarre, surreal and wonderful place, with great people.” Adrian Todd, Director.
AiQ works with clients and stakeholder to solve airport capacity problems quickly and innovatively. We optimise passenger experience, protect operations, maximise capacity and reduce risk. Contact us today to find out more about our team.
Find out more about our Process Model, and How We Work.