Introduction
In recognition of the unprecedented challenges and risks which, virtually overnight, threatened our airport community in 2020, the Solus team, working with key industry partners wanted to find a way to contribute to an industry that has for many years provided not just careers, but strong relationships and long-lasting friendships.
Understandably the pace of change was different from state to state, however many nations worked within a framework which sought to deescalate restrictions, including those on travel. Whilst encouraging, for airports that had to take significant measures to protect their ongoing operational and commercial viability, this brought fresh and potentially unparalleled challenges.
The Challenges Airports Face
As a multidisciplinary team with international experience working with airports, we acutely understood the difficulties being faced maintaining safe and efficient operations in a rapidly altered reality, including:
- drastically reduced aeronautical and non-aeronautical income but no change in high fixed costs,
- furlough and redundancy programmes leaving management teams without the inhouse resource and capability to effect meaningful change,
- short term crisis management priorities leaving little headroom to focus on the future,
- being forced to react to rapidly changing rules, regulations and procedures to maintain public health as well as traditional safety obligations,
- staff wellbeing concerns, recognising the pressures on individuals who may have taken on additional work responsibilities at a time when they are lacking currency in ’normal‘ operations, and
- the need for robust change management processes to manage risk and safely restart operations as travel restrictions ease.
As we began to emerge from lockdown, potentially with some high initial peaks in demand, this altered reality had to be once again carefully considered; key personnel were no longer be in the organisation, staff were filling combined and unfamiliar roles and everyone, from management to operational staff, were suffering a degree of skill-fade.
The Build Back Toolkit
To help all airports, whether a major international, regional, or local operation cope with these challenges, our team developed a scalable, flexible Toolkit comprising a number of areas of focus, designed to help airports identify key issues and help them to safely and effectively “build back…”; whether that be building back more resilient, efficient, greener or financially secure operations.
Equally, airports had a once in a generation opportunity, to “build back” in a different form; potentially using different business or operating models, targeting different sectors or changing investment priorities.
Our Toolkit, shown below, was based on extensive operational due diligence experience and provided an adaptable resource for airport teams to ensure they have covered the breadth of critical issues before determining which areas require specific focus and energy to identify approaches for effectively addressing them. It equally allowed them to identify opportunities to initiate and manage change.
The Toolkit could be tailored to each specific airport’s demands and requirements. From extensive analysis of the impact of COVID-19 and close engagement with the airport community, we identified the key Impact Areas that airports needed to consider.
In those challenging times, the temptation could have been to address the most pressing or obvious issues, but the purpose of the Toolkit was to ensure all relevant Impact Areas were considered. The Toolkit then identified the tools and processes that could be used to analyse them and then, perhaps most importantly, the optimum outcome for that Impact Area – i.e., ‘where do we want to be’.
Is the Toolkit still relevant today?
Whilst the pandemic may be behind us, airports have been in recovery mode ever since. According to Airports Council International, global passenger traffic is forecast to reach only 92% of 2019 levels this year.
In this context, we believe that the Impact Areas, Analysis methods, and Outputs are all still valid in providing a framework for assessing issues and identifying priorities.
One thing that we have developed further, is our Target Operating Model for Airports to ensure alignment between strategic objectives and operational delivery; and greater use of data to assess, monitor and improve performance through changes in behaviours.
If you would like to understand more, try out our Airport Capability Assessment Survey here.
