Background
Keeping Australia’s skies safe, the Civil Aviation Safety Authority’s (CASA) 800 people across the country register aircrafts, pilots, and monitor general aviation safety, including facilitating the safe growth of drones. CASA’s leadership had an ambitious plan to drive productivity improvements across its operations, and thus increase the safety outcomes for the public.
To achieve this, the organisation needed to rethink how it delivered regulatory services and surveillance across all jurisdictions, as well as enabling support systems such as policy and advisory, and information management. The scale of transformation necessary, in tandem with the critical requirement to ensure no disruption to safety systems, meant it must be planned and executed in collaboration with a breadth of different internal experts.
Outcomes
- Established new functions to support front-end industry guidance and quality assurance
- Redesigned roles to ensure that experienced aviation experts were freed to maximise their focus on using their expertise as much as possible, rather than simpler administrative tasks
- Reengineered regulatory processes bring down processing time, whilst maintaining safety outcomes
- Rebuilt a risk-based surveillance planning and response facility
Insights
- Speak with the people who do the work when planning how to transform essential services
- Bring the right people to the decision room when re-designing complex operations, enough to represent needs, and not too much to make a decision
- Do as much partnering with geographically-disparate teams as you can, to find the requirements no one else might know
