Airport Business - 12

MANAGEMENT
AUTHOR Nick Davidson, Richard Batty

Time to Reorganize -
WHY U.S. AIRPORTS NEED TO ADAPT THEIR
ORGANIZATIONS TO MEET INDUSTRY CHANGES
Optimizing airport performance starts with shaping the structure to support
the achievement of the organization's most important priorities.
ALL SUCCESSFUL businesses need to regularly review
and adapt their organization structures to address
evolving opportunities and challenges. The U.S.
airport industry is no exception - especially now.
Unprecedented structural changes currently face
American airports, including capital program funding,
erosion of primary revenue sources, such as airport
parking, and new emphasis on managing the endto-end customer experience.
These changes place new demands
on airport organizations and require
new organizational solutions to ensure
that management and staff are positioned
effectively to address new priorities. But
adapting complex organizations, while
maintaining business momentum and
staff engagement, requires experience,
insight and specialized expertise.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

RICHARD BATTY

Richard Batty has more than 25 years of consulting
and management experience in the airport and wider
transportation industries. He also has extensive experience in
strategic planning and organizational development in a wide
range of public and private sector businesses operating in
competitive environments.

NICK DAVIDSON

Nick Davidson has more than 30 years of experience with
airport governance, strategic planning, organizational
development and performance improvement and has
pioneered efficient airport strategic planning processes that
can transform organizational effectiveness.

Organizational Design is
Critical to Improving Airport Performance
Airport performance is ultimately about
people performance. No matter how
much airports invest in infrastructure
and technology, the value that these
investments deliver to the business and
the customer is directly a function of
the capability of the airport's staff. But
critically, their ability to work effectively
together, to deploy their individual skills
towards collective ends and to forge and
sustain a culture of success is directly
dependent on how they are organized.
As with any business, optimizing
airport performance starts with shaping
the structure to support the achievement
of the organization's most important
priorities. Achieving key outcomes in
dynamic, customer-focused businesses,
such as airports necessarily, requires
regular organizational adaptation. Just
because an organization structure has
met historical needs does not mean that

12 \ AIRPORTBUSINESS / AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2019

it is equipped to meet future needs - in
fact, it is almost certainly not. That said,
changing organizational structures
is difficult and sensitive. It is always
easier to stick with the status quo and
it is always possible to find reasons to
put off the change until later. However,
if the business plan changes and the
organizational model does not support
the change, then the plan is very likely
to fail.
When designing organizational
change, it is often tempting to plan the
change around the individual managers
in place today - but this inevitably results
in a suboptimal design and the risk of
underperformance. For example, to avoid
offending key managers, individuals
may be allowed to retain parts of their
portfolio that would fit better elsewhere
- risking ambiguity and overlap of
responsibilities with other managers.
It's better to design the organization
around a series of sound principles, such
Airport Business

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Airport Business
