Lean and Agile Principles Key for Airline Giant to Create Repeatable, Rapid and Accurate IT Process Frameworks

London – 19th November, 2009: emergn, a specialized consultancy enabling lean and agile principles across the value chain, today announced a series of successful projects with British Airways that have laid the foundation for the airline giant’s corporate-wide adoption of lean and agile project management principles.  Following project engagements to implement methods for faster, higher-quality web site software development, British Airways has moved forward with emergn to move from waterfall development methodologies to agile methods across multiple areas of the IT estate.

emergn’s engagement  began when British Airways made the decision to find a new method for developing software elements of its web site more quickly and with higher quality. After consulting with emergn’s team of experts, the airline industry leader seeded its Air Miles, Revenue Management and Customer Focused Selling groups within the BA.com division with emergn coaches to instil lean and agile project management principles. With emergn’s coaches mentoring business and technology team members on using lean and agile principles like user story creation, continuous improvement and retrospective planning, British Airways realized significant productivity gains, higher quality and much shorter ROI lifecycles in the BA.com groups. 

“We expected these projects to ultimately yield a set of repeatable, standardized processes that would allow us to be more nimble and efficient, but we never realised how fast we would start to see a noticeable, positive effect,” says Mike Croucher, head of software engineering at British Airways.  “The effect on the speed at which benefits can be realised has made a profound difference in the way we now approach projects, and beyond that we see emergn’s approach to lean enablement as a scalable way for every part of our IT landscape to become more efficient. The foundation they’ve laid is helping us to become a self-sustaining agile enterprise.”

emergn will continue to support British Airways with agile coaching and mentoring as the company seeks to bring earlier benefit realisation through agile methodologies across the enterprise. With the larger scale nature of the initiative, emergn will help British Airways reshape the processes and behaviours that are crucial for aligning the efforts of IT and business leaders alike to operate effectively in an agile environment.

“British Airways’ agile adoption is a great example of how these principles, when implemented prudently, can drive the business and IT sides of an organization to collaborate more effectively and foster mutual responsibility for meeting business goals,” said Alex Adamopoulos, CEO of emergn. “As British Airways has proven, the benefits of instilling agile principles are numerous. But what is just as important to realise is that adoption of lean principles is best achieved when it is done as an iterative exercise itself. Creating a blueprint for broader rollout based on practical knowledge and planning is critical for understanding how to bring its benefits to the entire organization’s landscape. British Airways is on track to build a faster, nimbler more accurate business with its agile program.”

For more information about emergn and the company’s other agile enablement programs, visit www.emergn.com.