Pat Shanahan, 787 VP & GM

“Everyone always says I have the most stressful job at Boeing but it doesn’t feel stressful, when I think back on jobs I’ve had,” Shanahan told Australian Aviation at the Farnborough Airshow.

“Obviously there is a lot of stress but it’s not overwhelming. ” Shanahan was appointed to lead the 787 as vice president and general manager in October last year, following a second embarrassing public announcement of delays to the program just three months after the 787’s rollout. Since then Shanahan and Boeing have had to announce two further serious production delays due to well publicised issues with the 787’s supplier base and production system.

“The big task has been to synchronise all the activity,” Shanahan said of his mission to recover the program.

“From the start when I got on the program back in October it has been about establishing the right disciplines, the right coordination. It sounds obvious, it’s kind of like when someone says ‘lose weight’, its diet and exercise, but in order to actually do it you have to have the right discipline, you’ve got to get the right Pat Shanahan, 787 VP & GM people in place, and then you have to get your timing straightened out. ” Over 50 airlines and leasing customers have ordered almost 900 787s to date, so the program has been more keenly watched than perhaps any other airliner development.

“Schedules are a really convenient way to get your head around if things are going right because by its binary, you hit a date or you don’t,” Shanahan detailed.

“But to do projects like this with their complexity, schedules are hard, and my focus has been about risk reduction. How do you take risk out of the program so that things can be more predictable? How do you reduce the risks so you can have more control? How do you assign resources given there are a lot of things to go and do? How do you approve coordination and communication. ” So what skills are needed to manage those tasks? “In terms of strong attributes I think the most important one is experience, right, so you could read a book but it won’t do you any good,” said Shanahan, who is also a previous VP and general manager of the 757 program. “The second piece is a strong network, knowing the people that are involved in this project so that you can communicate quickly and without lots of data. That is really important, because you may make a decision one day and then based on your information may make another decision – you want to be able to do that in a fast efficient manner. Then I’d say the fourth attribute is discipline to maintain focus, establish a routine, because that drives the organisation to focus.

“The last component is more generic, it’s leadership.

That’s really more around doing the right things instead of just following a process.

A lot of managers tend to ‘turn the wheel’ and follow the process, and leadership is more finding the right issues to work on and making the right decisions. ” And was Boeing over-ambitious in its decision making processes in establishing the original 787 schedule? “Over ambitious – in just saying that it sounds kind of naive, but when you look at the planning and then the desire to make a step function change in how the industry works, the level of performance on the airplane, that took a whole new set of thinking. And when you think differently you have to make certain assumptions about the future state, and if you don’t have ambitious goals then you have never really changed anything.

So then the question really becomes were some of those assumptions realistic. ” But despite the 787’s advanced technologies, he is not too concerned about technological problems, pointing to his recent military experience in the missile defence and directed energy fields.

“If you look at the maturity of the technology that goes into those products, many of them literally have gone from a laboratory and are being productionised,” Shanahan said. “The technologies that we are using (on the 787) are new in commercial aviation, (it is just that) they have never been scaled to this level in terms of production rates, so it’s in that context that I feel confident with the technology problem. ” Instead, the issue is more one of time.

“I’ve needed to work concurrently on getting the engineering completed, getting the testing done – you think of about all the composite structure and qualifying what we have to do to ensure it works as we’ve designed – and then all these systems that are being produced all around the world and then activating a new production system, so that concurrency has been the biggest balancing act. Find the risk, understand the impact, manage the concurrency, and drive to an integrated schedule. ” So when will Shanahan feel confident that his task is comfortably in hand? “What is important now is getting out of the engineering phase because I think things get easier when the aircraft stabilises configuration-wise, then we will get into a space that I think is a little more predictable. But variation right now is what is most stressful, so being predictable is when it gets to be downhill. Probably when you are flying is when you know you’re stable. ”