Applying Agile to Aerospace and Defense

The aerospace and defense industry has longstanding best practices and certain ways of approaching innovation. While it is one of the most innovative industries on the market, designing something new takes years. The tried and tested processes within the industry are what make the aerospace industry so reliable in the first place.

However, just because there are processes in place, doesn’t mean the industry cannot implement agile as an approach to problem-solving and task management. Agile is not meant to replace the meticulous processes already in place, but rather add new flexibilities to them. There are several ways to benefit from agile as a method in the aerospace and defense industry.

Visualized Task Management

One of the first and easiest things to do when it comes to implementing agile in the aerospace industry is adding a visual task management system into existing workflows. This is done by integrating the Kanban system with workflows already in place. As a result, this supercharges existing workflows using the Kanban system.

Teamwork, team communications, and general task management are among the aspects that get improved with the implementation of Kanban. Using tools like Kanbanize, it is also possible to divide complex projects into a series of smaller tasks waiting to be completed. Project completion tracking becomes easier at this stage.

Visualized tasks and the integration of the Kanban system also helps with managing project costs and eliminating reworks. This is the true advantage of implementing agile in aerospace and defense, particularly with complex projects now having to adapt to tighter budgets. You can learn more in this article by Kanbanize.

Flexible Processes

The application of agile as a methodology brings some degree of flexibility to existing processes. Ideally, you want to be firm with principles but offer some flexibility when it comes to designing processes. This is what agile can do to various workflows within the aerospace industry. It also helps companies in the industry achieve their goals faster.

What agile does is prioritize objectives and principles over processes. You can outline a set of objectives for a project or a task, and then let team members figure out the best and most efficient way to achieve those objectives. As a result, processes become more fluid, efficiency gets increased, and the whole company can operate in a more agile way.

Emphasis on Teamwork

Teamwork is an essential component of agile. Staying lean doesn’t mean limiting the resources available to projects and tasks. It simply means making sure that all team members can perform at their highest capacity without sacrificing reliability and accuracy. As stated before, a collaboration between team members is facilitated by systems like Kanban.

In this industry, in particular, teamwork allows for different functions to collaborate in a more seamless way. During product development and testing, for example, engineers with different backgrounds can combine their resources to solve problems, find new improvement possibilities, and develop a capable product as an outcome.

Customer Involvement

At the same time, agile allows customers of the industry-government agencies and enterprises – to be more involved in processes such as product development. Customer feedback and continuous improvement are essential to developing better products, both hardware, and software, and facilitating customer feedback is now a necessity rather than an option.

Customer involvement goes beyond feedback forms and meetings; we have to look at customers in a more holistic way. For starters, there are internal and external customers, with internal customers being departments that rely on other departments’ work to succeed. When viewed from this perspective, customer involvement becomes crucial indeed.

As more processes accommodate customer feedback, you slowly transition into continuous improvement rather than big leaps. New additions can be made on the fly and without ruining the integrity of the project or the roadmap around it. It is also at this point that the implementation of agile becomes more impactful.

A Continuous Cycle

The final result of applying agile in the aerospace and defense industry is a development process that relies on continuous improvement. In the long run, this is the approach that yields better results. Rather than starting from the beginning every time a new project is opened, teams can focus on improving existing products in a continuous way.

Updates can be pushed to products that are already on the market as well as new products in the pipeline. New technologies and improvements will continue to support industry output for years to come. All that is needed is a clear definition of a support period which allows teams to transition to an all-new development in a less disruptive way.

Continuous improvement lets teams fail quickly and learn from failures even faster. Fewer errors will be found and the errors that do exist are less catastrophic than ever. Combined with the other benefits discussed previously, there is no doubt that applying agile in the aerospace and defense industry is something that needs to be done today.