BAE Systems Case Study
BAE Systems – Winners of the UKAPMP 2007 Industry Award for Innovation
You work on an innovative new internal process for many months. You spend time refining it and launch it internally with great success. It’s welcomed by your peers and management. But will it stand up to external scrutiny? Sometimes it's only external validation that can provide that reassurance.
Heather Beeby, Head of Business Development Operations at BAE Systems CS&S International (Customer Support and Solutions) was confident that her new process was a success, but external recognition would be the icing on the cake.
In 2007 Beeby and her team launched a ‘Business Winning Wheel’ to simplify the company’s complex international bid life cycle management and visually demonstrate that the process wasn’t linear, but was in fact iterative and required both forwards and backwards actions. Although innovative and widely accepted within BAE Systems CS&S, it was only by entering and winning the UKAPMP 2007 Industry Award for Innovation that the team achieved the external recognition they deserved.
A simplified lifecycle
CS&S International, a business unit of BAE Systems, supports the growth of the company within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). Until recently Beeby was the head of a business winning operations team mostly based in the UK. In addition the team has a marketing support cell based in KSA.
Beeby was responsible for bringing together infrastructure, processes, people and work across the whole business. She believed that the company would benefit from a simplified lifecycle approach to business development including inception, delivery and close down. “If this involved new processes such as joint reviews across all business units, then the clients and prospects would benefit and ultimately BAE Systems too,” says Beeby.
Beeby and her team developed a pictorial wheel which showed the cyclical process. In addition they produced a reference guide – a set of simple rules to make sure that bid contributors were compliant. Each team member was given templates to help them complete bid sections in a standard way. For example, if a bid contributor wasn’t able to answer a question, they were encouraged not to simply leave it blank, but to explain why they were leaving it blank, making completion easier for the next person in the bid lifecycle.
The Business Winning Wheel was launched across the business, not only in the UK, but also in KSA. Implemented using a series of workshops, the new process helped the team think externally, target resource, ensure compliance, and most importantly, improve bidding and proposals.
External validation
Many people applauded the new process, not least Margaret Helsabeck, Director Centre for Performance Excellence who was extremely impressed with its simplicity. Margaret felt that the Wheel deserved some external recognition and it was after discussions with Helsabeck that Beeby came across the UKAPMP Industry Awards and decided to enter.
Beeby and a colleague attended the awards ceremony. “We were absolutely delighted when we won. You can work on something internally and think it’s good and useful but that doesn’t provide any external benchmark. Winning the UKAPMP Award for Innovation gave us validation,” says Heather. “And the management committee were extremely pleased with our success. They saw it as proof that the team hadn’t been wasting its time for 18 months!”
