With most traditional business-as-usual roles in the aviation industry being disrupted by Covid-19, Changi Airport Group (CAG)’s employees had an innovative opportunity to contribute to the organisation and discover new ways of working.

In late April, to enable employees to continue to learn and grow during this period, CAG’s People Team (PT, a.k.a Human Resources) started to explore ways in which the company can re-engage the workforce to chase new ideas and pivot to new business areas. Around the same time, a number of CAG divisions expressed that they needed additional talents with different skills to help them design and run their new projects.

PT recognised that this could be a great learning opportunity for staff to have “mini-attachments” outside their regular portfolio and be exposed to different areas of CAG’s business. Hence, the innovative idea for a skills-exchange platform was born!

Named Project Starship, a tongue-in-cheek reference to Star Trek – Starship Enterprise’s famous quote “To boldly go where no one has gone before”, this skills-exchange platform was a first for CAG, where project owners and individual employees can connect and the exchange of skills and time contributed be brokered. Starship also represents the organisation’s journey towards a more One-CAG type collaboration, where diverse talents from different clusters could come together to solve challenges and offer new ideas.

To enable Starship to be rolled out quickly, PT challenged themselves to design, build and execute this skills-exchange platform by only using internal resources. From the initial idea conceptualisation, PT managed to launch the platform successfully in just over a month.

Changi Journeys checked in with a project participant and a project leader, to learn more about their experience along this journey.

Screenshots taken during some of the focus group discussions 

To cater for CAG’s growing internal communications needs, the Corporate & Marketing Communications division was looking for volunteers to facilitate focus group discussions to obtain user feedback. Collated feedback would be used to aid the development of a new internal communications app for employees. One of the shortlisted volunteers, Daniel Foo, Senior Manager, Design Management, shared “I signed up for this project because it resonated with my own interest, which is to try my hands on different areas of CAG’s work, while learning new things and making new friends in the process. Through this project, I am glad to be able to contribute to CAG in a different way, outside my normal areas of work.

Participants brainstorming together during the ‘BOT-a-thon’ held in the first week of October

Kevin Ang, Senior Manager, Airport Operations Management, the leader of another project ‘Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Citizen Developer Programme’ added, “My team was looking into scaling the adoption of RPA across CAG, which would improve productivity through the building of more automated workflows, eliminating the need for repetitive data entry. After training a community of enterprise RPA developers, these staff enthusiasts participated in a three-days ‘BOT-a-thon’, where everyone came together to brainstorm processes across the organisation which could benefit from RPA, and thereafter, work on actual use cases for CAG.

Following the success of the first wave of Starship projects, PT has planned for periodic call-outs to divisions to continue launching new waves of projects, to ensure a continuous flow of opportunities for staff, to support employees’ aspirations in this journey.