Boeing 787 Dreamliner

The Boeing 787 Dreamliner announced in 2003 and flight-certified in 2011, and is considered Boeing’s most revolutionary project. It is a mid-size, wide body aircraft that is 20% more fuel efficient than similar sized airplanes. The reduction in fuel consumption was achieved by implementing a large proportion of composites into the structure of the plane which made Dreamliner about 35,000 pounds lighter than similar sized aircraft. The project was set to start on April 2004 with an estimated budget of $5 billion and was planned to be complete in the summer of 2008. The actual aircraft release was in September 2011 with a final cost of almost $20 billion. Lessons learned from this project include: The performance of a project should be reasonable instead of an ambitious or risky one, Scope creep should be evaluated and controlled carefully, and quick response is vital to scope changes and comprehensive trade-off studies should be conducted whenever and wherever necessary.

Two of the management lessons discovered by my student teams:  Recognize the risks and complexity of outsourcing an unprecedented proportion of design and manufacturing to three tiers of suppliers around the world; in the face of obvious problems, honesty may be the best policy.

This is part of a series of blogs about recently completed projects, thanks to my University of TorontoMaster of Engineering students for their much more detailed reports.