Operations Consulting
When your drone operations enable your business and you need to manage them effectively
Operations Consulting
When your drone operations enable your business and you need to manage them effectively
As drones are becoming more affordable and capable, lots of organization have started to build in-house drone operations. Many of these programs have grown organically, enabling internal teams of field engineers to use drones in their work. Frequently, their initial focus has been ensuring that drone operations and its deliverables work properly and are applicable for the targeted work scenario.
However, as organizations start to rely on the drone operations, they expect them to seamlessly integrate with other organizational processes and start to demand much higher levels of quality, efficiency and control.
If such requirements are not recognized and addressed in good time, they can rapidly become very complex and cause a lot of frustration and lost opportunities, consequently leading to bad perception of the entire drone program within the organization. Similar scenario was seen in many IT organizations decades ago. Even today its effects often cause challenges for those organizations.
To ensure long term success and optimize the value of its drone operations an organization needs to manage various issues and topics, such as the following.
Business Relationships
How do we effectively communicate with the business and keep agreeing on what quality of service should/can/do we provide?
How do we explain the value of our drone program and secure adequate budgets required for the operations and developments?
Dependencies
Do we know what are the key streams and components of our drone program and who is responsible for each component
What are the elements of cost of our drone program and how can we control them?
Capacity
Do we effectively manage our geographically dispersed fleet of drones and accompanying equipment?
How can we make sure that we have enough capacity when needed without unnecessary overspending and commitment?
Risk & Safety
How do we manage business risks that we are exposed to due to our drone operations?
How do we prove to the regulator that we know what we are doing so that they allow us to operate drones in complex scenarios?
Operations
How do we make sure that all the teams in the field operate to the same standards of safety and efficiency?
How do we manage our fleet of drones and make sure that a change would not cause unexpected changes and accidents?
Knowledge
How do we make sure that our drone operations do not depend on the knowledge that only a few experts have?
Do we use events and incidents as learning opportunities for the entire organization?
How can we help?
We use our experience with service management for enterprise IT as well as manned and unmanned aviation to help customers assess their current practices, compare them with industry best practices, understand risks to which they are exposed due to the gaps and understand the benefits and prioritize improvement actions. Finally, we help them plan and implement the improvements.
Our offerings fit into the continual improvement cycle of service management:
Drone Operations Assessment
Structural assessment of tactical and operational customer practices related to usage of drones, comparison with best practices, identification of gaps and risks.
Activities:
On site multiple interviews with key stakeholders and review of the existing documentation and reports
Knowledge transfer during the interviews; all the questions and impacts of different answers are explained in detail
Reporting (off-site)
Drone Roadmap Creation Workshop
Activities:
Series of facilitated brainstorming exercises – attended by all the key stakeholders
Process Improvement Accelerators
Activities (worhshops):
Presentation of relevant best practices
Roles and responsibilities review
Process flow (re)design sessions
Goals and targets review
Process testing and design updates
Next steps planning and reporting
Variations:
Listed activities typically focus on one or several very related processes. In case where multiple processes need to be addressed, multiple Process Improvement Accelerators need to be scheduled (in sequence). Commonly addressed processes are:
Business relationship and service level management
Risk management
Safety management
Operations management
Knowledge management
Configuration & maintenance
Financial management
Continual Improvement Support
Activities (non-exhaustive list):
Trainings and knowledge transfer
Process monitoring, improvement recommendation and redesign
Improvement plan facilitation or management
Ongoing process management (e.g. risk manager)
Ad hoc consultation
Regular visits or remote answers on demand
Frequently asked questions
The described packaged engagements:
- target particular process or related group of issues thus enabling you to prioritize and focus on improvements that bring you the most important benefits
- are short in duration and therefore easy to budget for and fit in the schedule
- can be delivered as a stand-alone engagement to address a particular need or as a part of series of engagements that facilitate long term growth and improvement
- are adapted to the specific customer’s environment – we do not use an empty template as the final deliverable
- can provide help in all the phases – from initial assessment and planning through process improvement activities and as a continual support and improvement
- are based on experiences used to help numerous customers worldwide to improve their service management practices
The approach is scalable and it can be fitted to organizations of different sizes and maturity, however, it will be the most beneficial for organizations with larger and relatively complex drone operations. For smaller organizations and those that are just starting we recommend our Adoption Accelerator packages.
Any new process can introduce additional steps and work but the ultimate goal is always to make you more effective and to support your overall business better. We share experiences about all best practices but, ultimately, we only recommend the changes that make sense for your organization’s ambitions, needs and capabilities.
We aim to deliver all the packaged engagements with a predefined duration and with similar set of activities and deliverables. Such approach, which is based on compact and focused engagements, has proved to be very effective as it enables customers to promptly target the biggest opportunities and keep the momentum of improvements. However, certain level of flexibility exists and we can adapt the detailed planning in line with the circumstances.
Yes. Our Continual Improvement Support package is fully customizable. Furthermore, through it you can have access to the same expertise and materials as in the packaged engagements but in a structure and schedule tailored fully to your particular needs.
Typically, we set a fixed price for the entire engagement based on its scope and agreed deliverables. That way we can be predictable about the cost of the engagement and enable you to assess its value in advance.
No. Scoping and sizing of a package are regarded as presales activity and not charged.
At the moment we work mainly in English language.
UAS Consulting SPRL
Rue Jourdan 85
1060 Bruxelles
Belgium
IBAN: BE95 7350 4520 9058
VAT: BE0672.602.156
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