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Business Goal Alignment

Ensuring a complex air traffic management programme delivers its strategic business, technical and safety goals

Client: NATS (formerly National Air Traffic Services Ltd)

Context

NATS is one of Europe's leading Air Navigation Service Providers. It has embarked on the Future Centres Project, a major multi-national collaborative programme to introduce a new generation of technology into its operations centres.

What we did

integrate was commissioned to address the challenge of achieving alignment between the high-level business, technical and safety goals of the programme and the emerging technical solution. Following a scoping stage, an innovative and elegant approach was adopted which is assisting the programme team in delivering its commitments to the business.

Specific highlights included:

  • identifying an appropriate information architecture, based on structured arguments, that supports the decomposition of goals into requirements; traceable links to reference information and issues; and the collection of evidence to demonstrate compliance
  • defining high level processes for the development and through-life maintenance of information required to demonstrate compliance of the programme with high-level business, technical and safety goals
  • defining a change process, with supporting tools, to underpin "what if" investigations and the management of system variants
  • developing a customised DOORS environment which allows non-technical stakeholders at all levels to contribute to the elaboration and review of decomposition and compliance arguments
  • training stakeholders in the processes and tools
  • realising organisational capability development through continuing mentoring and support

Outcome

The tools and processes introduced by integrate are being adapted for continued use by the project team. NATS is considering embarking on a wider rollout of the tools and processes, and integrate and NATS have concluded an agreement that would allow the introduction of the tools across NATS' partners and supply chain for evaluation of the tools.