Empower your Airport Duty Managers

Most often, operational problems are not caused by the airport infrastructure, but lie in the organization. You may find situations where daily operation is focused on airside and on troubleshooting only. Processes are hardly perceived as such and infrastructure and maintenance deficiences are considered to be issues of specialized services. Work is primarily reactive. Airport Duty Managers wait until a problem is reported and then try to resolve it or refer the caller to another department (maintenance & engineering, IT, cleaning, etc.). They do not feel responsible. The obvious reaction of the affected is to call senior airport executives instead to make things happen.

How can we empower our staff, intensify the dialogue with the airport partners and in particular implement a process focus?

1. Assign responsibility for each core process to an Airport Duty Manager which covers infrastructure and quality of that process.
2. Make sure that process weaknesses and infrastructure issues are continuously addressed in a structured manner.
3. Define, implement and monitor service levels with internal and external partners.
4. Discuss and implement contingency plans together with the partners.
5. Establish a dialogue with partners on each management level with a discussion about quality and performance.
6. Make partners aware of the issues and how you address them.

 And we may achieve

• Better cooperation with partners.
• Mutual understanding about each other's business and its issues.
• Partners become more aware of what the airport actually delivers, day by day.
• Airport users percieve the improvements in quality and performance and the image will improve.
• More airlines are attracted.