Airport Software Implementation Support
Five months of onsite research, stakeholder interviews, and documentation to help one of the world's busiest airports adopt a new operations platform.
NDA: Under NDA. I can speak to the process and my role, but not the client name or proprietary details.
I supported the implementation of a next-generation airport operations platform at one of the most well-traveled airports in the world. The engagement ran from February through May 2025, spanning five onsite visits and dozens of stakeholder sessions.
The slot-management firm overseeing gate assignments, airline schedules, and day-of terminal operations was replacing a legacy platform with a modern, cloud-native suite. Old habits ran deep: baggage allocation lived in Excel, and the scheduling coordinator had built 70+ workaround rules in the old system. Adopting the new platform meant rethinking processes shaped by the old one's limits.
Getting it right took more than configuration. It took someone embedded in the operation, talking to the people who would use the software every day.
A major international airport needed to adopt two new enterprise operations platforms, an Airport Operational Database (AODB) and a Resource Management System (RMS), while managing a complex stakeholder landscape, a tight timeline, and deeply embedded legacy workflows.
- Conducted field research and stakeholder interviews across 12+ roles
- Mapped stakeholders and defined user roles across multiple organizations
- Built user permission matrices for both platforms
- Wrote user stories and test cases organized by job title
- Developed training manuals and quick-start guides for frontline staff
- Facilitated workflow design sessions with the vendor's engineers
- Documented compliance and reporting workflows for system configuration
The platform went live on schedule in August 2025 and has since managed 140,000+ flights with zero allocation conflicts.
The research started before getting onsite. I used ChatGPT and Gemini to research how airport slot management works and to build a glossary of industry terms and acronyms, and I pulled job descriptions and LinkedIn profiles to draft initial user personas.
Onsite, I shadowed the scheduling team, went up in the tower to observe day-of operations, and met with the Ancillary Space Coordinator, Facilities Manager, Compliance Analyst, and operations leadership. Each role had a different relationship with the data and a different tolerance for the gap between what the system said and what was happening in reality.
From that research and several workshops, I built stakeholder maps and user role definitions across the firm and multiple airport authority groups. That segmentation fed directly into the user permission matrices for both platforms, deciding how many roles the airport needed and exactly what each could see and do. It looks like a spreadsheet but is really the output of weeks of research.