Case Study

Federal Aviation Administration:
Unifying an IT Workforce for Future Success.

Introduction:

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is the largest transportation agency of the U.S. government and regulates all aspects of civil aviation in the country as well as over surrounding international waters. Its mission is “to provide the safest, most efficient aerospace system in the world.” They manage 19,633 airports and on average 45,000 daily flights.

Federal Aviation Administration Logo

The Challenge:

The Federal Aviation Administration, IT Operations, Air Traffic Organization needed to transform the mission, allegiance, culture, and processes of 3 headquarters and 17 diverse regional organizations into a one, newly created organization, while literally keeping the planes and public flying. This included 242 staff with 60,000+ users in 975 locations. The FAA engaged Dr. Deborah to facilitate these changes.

Major activities:

  • Facilitated senior staff in creation of organizational strategy, mission, and value statements. 
  • Created proprietary process to utilize the Competing Values Framework in the Organizational Culture Assessment (OCAI Instrument) to assess current organizational culture and  to define preferred culture. Facilitated senior management team to understand culture change, use OCAI, define desired cultural values, and bring organization into alignment over an eight month period. 
  • Developed, updated, and distributed IT Operations Processes Handbook. Included Visio processes, pictorial processes, and supporting forms. This included reengineering 30 processes.
  • Developed website for processes to facilitate communications and implementation across organization.
  • Trained national senior leaders on new processes over web so they could train their staff.

Results:

  • This effort earned the senior FAA leader two peer federal IT awards.
  • The reorganization was successful in changing the culture and operating procedures.
  • The senior leaders brought staff into alignment to the new culture, strategy, mission and value statements.
  • Processes, procedures, resources, management controls, rewards, and metrics aligned to the strategy.

“Since we were consolidating multiple organizations and facilities while continuing to support the user base, my management team was torn between providing support and thoughtfully and correctly building the new organization. Dr. Jenks took the reins and facilitated the creation of critical documents and handbooks that resulted in a wildly successful IT operations organization. I was told by several senior executives that what we were attempting was impossible and we were being set up for failure – a unionized workforce in the federal government does not like to make his type of radical organizational change. But we pulled it off, and much of the credit goes to Dr. Jenks’ leadership in providing critical behind-the scenes foundational support.

The cultural transformation executed by the organization was remarkable, and the performance of the entire team was benchmarked by the Gartner organization two years into the transformation to centralized management – we were determined to be one one-hundredth of a point shy of “best in class” measured against federal and private sector IT operations and data center service providers. Much of the credit goes to Dr. Jenks’ development of overarching, foundational documents that enabled all employees, nation-wide, to align and provide outstanding service to our customers.”

Rich Boe
Manager of IT Operations, Air Traffic Organization, Retired