Airbus: “Leadership has evolved just as much as we have.”
Skywise is a new and exciting ambition at Airbus, explains Florian Labadens: “If you know that thousands of Airbus airplanes are in the air at any given moment, you also know there are terabytes of data being generated continuously: aircraft system data, airline data and technical performance to name a few. Skywise is the ambition to harvest that data continuously, to store it securely and to leverage it in best-in-class applications, available to ourselves and to our customers, suppliers and partners.”
Impressive aeronautics
Laeticia chimes in: “This is really taking place at the forefront of the aeronautics industry. Highly competitive, highly ambitious, and progressing at high speeds, nonetheless. I was the RTE for the first Agile Release Train, which took off with just a few teams in aircraft maintenance. Today we are at 500 team members, with me as the STE managing the global impediments with the various RTEs. It’ll be interesting to present at the RTE Summit, because we’re taking this moment for ourselves to look back as well.”
Impressive failures and successes
Florian: “If the atmosphere at the RTE Summit allows for open discussion of ‘screw-ups’, well we have some great examples to share with the crowd. We’re proud of where we stand today, especially with our background as a conventional manufacturer of physical product. But because we moved fast, we broke things too.”
Laeticia: “Among the lessons learned that we can share with the RTE audience are practices to enrich the onboarding process for new RTEs, making the role easier to sustain and scale up. The process we went through to become more Agile in the heavily regulated aeronautics environment are rather interesting as well.”
Managing stakeholders as RTEs is a recurring theme, and middle management can be both a formidable champion as well as an adversary in the evolution of Agility.
Leadership evolves too
Florian: “A third leg to stand on for our presentation is the journey our leadership has gone through. Managing stakeholders as RTEs is a recurring theme, and middle management can be both a formidable champion as well as an adversary in the evolution of Agility.”
Laeticia: “Indeed…! This is where we as an organization have had to evolve. Besides learning to embrace and solidify our own Agile ways of working, the various Trains involved in Skywise have also learned to learn to recognize and mitigate their own ‘splendid isolation’ as a high-level ambition.”
