I believe I can fly - Project Management Culture at AIRBUS

Airbus, as a global organization, building, selling and delivering 600 airplanes a year, with a sales backlog of more than 4.600 planes to be delivered, and an additional 1.608 aircrafts sold in 2012 and building up their backlog by another 1.000 in on year, this is definitely a company that requires a great project management culture.

Kevin Baker shares some insights.

By looking at their projects, A&D Projects do fail in time and budget, that was the overall situation a couple of years ago. Different drivers have been identified:

• Project Management Challenges
• Technical Complexity
• Talent Shortage
• Supply Chain Challenges
• Politics

Looking at some of them AIRBUS defined a new Culture for Project Management:

A set of shared P&PM visions, behaviours, values, and practices that characterizes an organization.

5 Steps have been taken to implement that:

1. Creating a PM Referential - A Book of PM Guidelines, Tools and Templates
2. A 'Community of Practice' has been build around that to have a cycle of influence
3. A Common Tool set has been created
4. And Project Categorization and Tailoring  hast been implemented and applied by asking 16 questions in 3 different fields like Complexity, Risk, and Challenge.
5. Competency Development is key, as projects are about people by looking at E-Learning, Certification Process and and a specific Career Path, all aligned to the Categorization and overall Portfolio

Great insights about a company that should and has embraced Project Management into their overall Culture. 

From Project Management definitely a place to work at.

So look at the sketch note to get even more impulses.