Creating Value Through Program Excellence: A Chief Looks Beyond

Honeywell Aerospace executes programs around the globe, ensuring on-time project delivery, cycle-time reduction, keeping costs within budget, and impacting airline customers positively. This is only possible due to the relentless execution efforts of our program managers and project engineers, which takes program management to the next level. At Honeywell, I lead and mentor teams of program managers and project engineers across geographies with a strong focus on building a sustainable ecosystem for excellence in program execution.

About my work: As a Chief Program Manager for Aerospace, I guide program management and project teams across different programs with my knowledge and experience. I feel working on complex Avionics like Flight Management Systems and Flight Controls is rewarding from a technical perspective and at the same time hectic, due to program execution challenges. Developing the Honeywell Auto Pilot solution for the National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL) SARAS Aircraft in India working for the Flight Controls team was one of the proudest achievements in my career, which ensured the establishment of the Flight Controls CoE in India. Good program execution is a trigger for a strong business performance and customer satisfaction, enabling the engineer to focus on growth apart from regular work. In my role, I have always tried to inculcate a cultural change in how programs are planned and executed without stoppages, as well as to build a sustainable execution ecosystem that includes good program managers/project engineers. Another aspect is in developing the talent (Program Manager, Project Engineers, Program Planning, and Control Analysts) required to execute programs flawlessly, who are well equipped to prepare and handle program management challenges in a systemic way.

What motivates me: Having a passion for winning, thinking big, and making it happen are the things that motivate me always. Accountability, influencing things, engaging with senior leadership teams, challenging initiatives, and working on Honeywell legacy applications is what matters to me. Honeywell has been at the forefront of innovation and developing robust products for Aviation that make flying safer. The culture of innovation, of strong collaboration, best practices sharing, and a good focus on the Honeywell behaviors has enabled me in driving the right results and creating more value for our businesses and customers.

What excites me at work and how it matters: As an engineer, my first love has always been building things and tinkering with electronics. While there is great focus on ‘connected’ to stay relevant and be prepared for the future, I believe equal focus is needed on our existing products to ensure we deliver value to our customers. Honeywell Aerospace believes in the importance of good and robust program management to deliver products to our customers on time and achieving its business goals drove me into program management from engineering. In my role, I try to ensure that the programs kick off well in advance, creating a sustainable execution rigor that leads to program completion on time and on budget. I had pursued my MBA in Aerospace from Toulouse Business School to stay relevant and bridge the gap between engineering and business.

My thoughts on the future: When it comes to program management, good planning is an absolute must to ensure programs achieve the business goals and in this new world where technology changes are rapid, program management also needs to change and align with it. Time to market, short-cycle business, products for high-growth, low-cost regions, and the ability to adapt quickly to changing customer needs is vital. This means it’s more critical to have good planning than ever before. It also means pace of planning and execution must drastically improve to remain competitive in the market. Lean product development, deployment principles of AGILE during execution of programs to deliver incremental features, constant customer feedback, and adapting the products to changing needs of customers and the market will place us ahead of our competitors. Aerospace has traditionally been a long-cycle business, but it’s changing and we are well set to adapt and are ready for developing connected products that are still robust and feature rich.