As transformation scaled rapidly, delivery needed a reset. The airline had committed to a multi-year turnaround, with a large pipeline of digital and technology investments accelerating. Leadership had the ambition. The organisation didn't yet have the system to deliver it.
The problems were interconnected and compounding:
- Low confidence in the portfolio. The investment inventory and financial baselines weren't defined and consistent enough to support decision making or trusted reporting. Leaders couldn't see clearly what they were investing in.
- No shared delivery language. Teams didn't have a common way of working — processes were unclear and consultation expectations were inconsistent across the organisation.
- Priority initiatives under strain. Several major programmes needed tighter governance and reshaping to restore momentum and credibility with stakeholders.
- Rapid ramp-up raised risk. New project contractors were joining fast and needed a clear, practical delivery model to integrate smoothly and contribute from day one.
The situation called for someone to step in, stabilise the delivery environment, and build the foundations that would carry the turnaround through to completion.
PQ acted as the interim Project Delivery Office (PDO) build and stabilisation team, working side-by-side with IT, business leaders, and finance. Rather than arriving with a fixed methodology, we started by understanding how work actually flowed — and where the system was breaking down.
The work unfolded across four interconnected workstreams:
- Set the foundations. Defined how all improvement work was classified, who owned what, and which forums and gates drove decisions. This gave the portfolio a backbone it had been missing.
- Rebuild and baseline the portfolio. Cleaned and re-catalogued initiatives against the new standards to establish a credible single source of truth — the basis for every funding and prioritisation conversation that followed.
- Designed the end-to-end lifecycle. Integrated operations, architecture, business and finance touchpoints into one coherent delivery pathway. Teams stopped working in parallel silos and started working in sequence.
- Stabilised priority work and embedded the delivery approach as BAU. Reviewed major initiatives, reshaped plans where needed, and trained and coached teams so the PQ way became everyday practice — including for the rapidly growing delivery cohort joining each month.
Throughout the engagement, PQ sat alongside leadership — not above it. The goal was always to build internal capability, not dependency.
The PDO gave the airline a dependable platform for transformation. Within the engagement period, the organisation had moved from fragmented, low-confidence delivery to a system that leaders trusted and teams could use.
These foundations supported a multi-year turnaround: $400M of investments in digital and customer experience, a successful return to public markets, and sustained profitability and competitiveness — delivered by a team that had the system to see it through.