Industries / Aviation
A common operating picture, and the discipline to use it.
An airport is dozens of organizations that do not report to each other, working to the same set of departure times. An integrated operations center only helps if the people in it have a shared way of seeing a problem and doing something about it.
This page is shorter than the others, on purpose. It is written strictly from the documented record of one engagement, at San Francisco International Airport between January and October 2024. Where we would normally add a second example or a client quotation, we have left the space empty rather than fill it. Craig is supplying more detail, and this page will grow.
The engagement
Standing up the Airport Integrated Operations Center.
Craig was selected as one of the initial six members to launch San Francisco International Airport's new Airport Integrated Operations Center, and served as its inaugural continuous improvement lead.
The purpose of an operations center of this kind is end-to-end visibility: a common operating picture across a unionized, multi-stakeholder environment where the airport authority, airlines, ground handlers, concessions, security and maintenance all hold a piece of the same day.
Standing one up is not principally a technology problem. Screens are the easy part. The difficult part is agreeing what is worth watching, what a deviation means, who acts on it, and what happens next, in an environment where nobody can direct anybody else.
The work was therefore operational design: dashboards, daily management routines, leadership check-ins, and the escalation and problem solving behaviour that turns a room full of information into decisions.
What was built
- SFO's first continuous improvement program. Not a project, a program, meaning structured problem solving and strategy deployment taught into the operating culture rather than run by a central office.
- A project management course covering correct use of scheduling charts and daily improvement cycles, built because the gap was in how projects were planned and tracked, not in effort.
- Operational dashboards and daily management routines giving executive level visibility and, more usefully, giving department leaders and hourly teams something they could act on the same day.
- Senior leadership training in continuous improvement and structured problem solving across multiple departments.
- Task breakdowns and time studies across airport operations, to find where time was actually going rather than where it was assumed to be going.
One example in detail
Mapping the gate turn.
Craig led a cross-functional team to map ideal gate turnover times: the full sequence between an aircraft arriving and the next one departing, with every organization that touches it.
Two things fell out of the map. The first was duplicated vendor equipment and cross-alley conflicts that were delaying turns, which is the kind of problem that is invisible from inside any single organization and obvious the moment everyone maps the sequence together.
The second was larger. The map surfaced an economies-of-scale case for consolidating ground crew operations, an argument that could not have been made from a schedule or a budget, because it only appears when you can see the whole turn at once.
That is the general point about aviation, and about any multi-employer operation. The waste is rarely inside one organization. It is in the seams between them, and no one organization can see it alone.
Where this applies
Not only airports.
The same pattern, an operations center coordinating parties who do not report to one another against a fixed clock, appears in hospital command centers, in large logistics hubs, and increasingly in construction programme management. Craig has built daily management and problem solving capability in the first of those as well, which is described on the Healthcare page.
If you are standing up an operations center, the question worth asking before the fit-out is specified is not what to display. It is what decision each display is supposed to cause, and who is empowered to make it.
Curious how this would work on your team?
Book a discovery conversation. We will ask what you are trying to achieve and what is getting in the way, which is also how every engagement starts. Practical conversation, no sales pitch.