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Churchill: The Agile PM (Part 20)
Most people are very familiar with Winston Churchill but may not be familiar with his “agile” approach to project management and his skills as a PM in the summer of 1940. With an invasion imminent, Part 19 looked at the second area of the overall project (Part 16) creating intelligence and knowledge. This article looks at the third area, RAF Fighter Command, and how the clever use of emerging technologies and reengineered processes could better maximize the effectiveness of pilots/fighters in an integrated air defense or sense-and-respond system.
In June 1940, despite Air Marshall Hugh Dowding’s best efforts his organization faced major challenges with massive losses of 500 operational fighters (a total of 1,029 aircraft and over 1,500 personnel) in the air battle over Flanders and France. With 620 fighters, the RAF was about 50 percent below its target (set in 1939) of 1,200, the minimum thought to win an air battle over the United Kingdom. The fighters were outnumbered by a ratio of 2:1.
When Dowding founded RAF Fighter Command in 1935, he was aware that the Air Ministry was very slow in scaling up its fighter production schedule and unlikely to reach minimum target levels required. So he looked to other ways to assist his fighters in an air battle the most significant was the physical organization of Fighter Command, a geographically …
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