Delft University of Technology
Faculty Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering Transport Technology
L.R. Bieshaar Improving and consolidating Eurocontrol's Air Traffic Management development organisation Masters thesis, Report 2006.PEL.7068, Transport Engineering and Logistics / Industrial Organisation.
Eurocontrol wants to lead ATM improvements, be a recognised leader and do this in an excellent way. The ATM environment asks more and more for a cross domain, cross boundary, integrated approach to improve and innovate the ATM system. Analysis of the current situation resulted in the following issues:
Fragmented and isolated organisational units and ATM improvements
Low knowledge, visibility and quality of project information outside project or unit boundaries Minimal linking between Top down and Bottom up strategy and improvements
Business strategy and budgeting split from ATM strategy and architecture
Flawed confronting and tuning function and missing top down mandates disable innovation portfolio management (prioritisation, decision making) Changing the organisation shows that it is possible to:
Reduce organisational fragmentation
Reduce fragmentation of staff over units (less bosses) and projects
Organise a ATM portfolio driven project organisation with a flexible resource allocation
Organise a centralised ATM portfolio management function with field support to consolidate and harmonise the way projects are run The elimination of the domain boundaries, the domain hierarchy line and the hierarchy split over flexible portfolio based units improves the sharing of information, transparency and quality of data. Also the field support group impacts positively on this, but only if a hands on approach is used.
To organise the ATM improvements from a portfolio point of view, the most important improvement is the design and gathering of the ATM portfolio data.
On first sight it looks like portfolio management is organised. A detailed analysis shows major flaws and the limited use of portfolio management. Chapter 11 (Improving Portfolio management) addresses these flaws and proposes improvements. The proposal includes the major first steps that have to be followed to improve the knowledge about the portfolio. The incomplete and inaccurate knowledge of the actual activities limit the success of a new organisational unit to manage the ATM portfolio. Decision making and prioritisation within the portfolio is impossible in this situation. The proposal to improve the ATM portfolio data model addresses this by:
Consistency and rollup/ inheritance capabilities
Maintaining and updating data in one location (within the data model as well as linking/ importing of data). This also concerning resources, organisational, tasks versus ATM improvements which are now split over two units and two different tools/ models which are linked after. Added value in automatic triggers, issues and visualisation to minimise project documentation and updating. This reduces paperwork considerably. From a cultural point of view some big hurdles are still to be taken, which are not analysed or addressed in this report. Breaking existing organisational boundaries, flexible resource allocation combined with an involved and hands on field project support impacts positively on the reluctance of sharing information and protectionism. This asks for a strong Top down mandate to further investigate and consolidate best practices to prevent reinvention of the wheel and duplication of work.
Reports on Production Engineering and Logistics (in Dutch)
