RADAR transforms project management

London Stansted Airport is part of the Manchester Airport Group (MAG), one of the country’s largest UK owned airport operators. Manchester Airport, East Midlands Airport and Bournemouth Airport are also a part of MAG.

Stansted Airport is London’s third-busiest airport, currently serving over 24 million passengers a year. With over a hundred projects taking place at any one time, Stansted required a system that could show the totality of these projects in a single view end to end across the airport. “There was no central repository of information” says Brian Pratt, Head of Capital Programme Delivery “previously it was run off spreadsheets on individual servers not accessible to all.”

“There was little control, little governance around the projects and no alignment to show what the objectives were as an airport” adds Karen Smart, Asset Management.

Microsoft Gold Partners BCN Group previously worked with Manchester Airport on a variety of projects including Office 365, email, infrastructure, migration as well as SharePoint and were recommended to London Stansted as the partner that could drive this project forward.

Jo Crowhurst, Strategic Programme Manager was given a brief “show me everything that’s going on in the airport in one place”. As London Stansted were already using Microsoft Office 365 for email Jo worked closely with BCN Group to develop a bespoke application using SharePoint Online.

Together with Jo, BCN Group built and designed RADAR – an application that could provide senior leadership a single source of credible up-to date information. A tool that can show a high level snap shot of all of the change portfolio underway at the airport at any one time.

The results have been extremely positive with RADAR, so much so, that Manchester Airport Group is looking to roll it out across other airports within the group.

“We’ve got a great working relationship with BCN Group – I don’t think that I’ve worked with a better supplier in a very very long time of doing this sort of development work – I’m really pleased with what we are doing.”

“Project managers have been extremely surprised and impressed at how easy it is to use.”

“It’s been really easy to take the basic product we were looking to develop and work with BCN Group to develop it to be bespoke for what our needs are and ensure it’s a system that can be used by all, it’s one that meets the need of today and also of the future.”

“The file structure setup is very simple, very straightforward and easy to navigate.”

“Benefits of using SharePoint is that it’s accessible to everybody that needs to have access to it to see the projects in real time.”

“RADAR has allowed us to run more effective meetings and enabled the directors to see the output of their governance system.”

“Easy way of monitoring what can be quite difficult governance procedures put in place to get our projects delivered.”

“Powerful tool that can present the totality of the change portfolio. We’ve never had all of our work in one place so that we can have a single credible source of the truth.”

“Using SharePoint is a nice happy medium. People can access the information, download it, do with it what they want. The bespoke element has made it a more usable system, rather than just SharePoint off the shelf.”