For a company built on the principle that everyone owns their patch, getting four global regions to agree on anything is no small feat.
Flight Centre Travel Group’s corporate division now spans more than 27 countries and roughly 3,500 to 4,000 people – and earlier this year it overtook leisure to become the largest contributor to group total transaction value, accounting for 51 per cent of TTV against 39 per cent in HY20. Productivity across the group now exceeds $1 million per employee, with TTV per full-time employee up 13 per cent year-on-year.
Behind those numbers is a back-end story that doesn’t always make the headlines.
For years, each of FCTG corporate’s four regions – EMEA, Americas, Australia and Asia – ran their own project management tools, their own workflows, their own ways of tracking progress. It worked, until it didn’t.
“Historically the regions needed to run their own work stack,” says Richard Galassi, who leads the global PMO for FCTG’s corporate division. “But if we were going to move to a global way of working, we had to consolidate.”
The trigger was visibility – or the lack of it. Project updates were being manually compiled across disconnected systems, meaning by the time a report landed in front of a decision-maker, it could already be a week out of date. In an industry that moves as fast as travel, Galassi says that lag is the difference between a timely decision and an untimely one.
The solution was Smartsheet, deployed globally across the corporate PMO around seven to eight months ago. The platform gave the business real-time dashboards tracking risk, milestones and schedule performance – automatically aggregated across programs, no manual compilation required.
But the technology was arguably the easier part.
Flight Centre has a famously entrepreneurial culture. Store leaders and regional heads are empowered to run their own operations, and that instinct runs deep. Walking in and mandating a new system, even the right system, was never going to land.
“You could easily walk in and go, I’ve made this decision, this is what we’re going to do,” Galassi says. “And it could be the right decision, but it’s never going to gel as much. People want a sense of agency and feedback and input.”
The approach instead was to build the case around shared interest – starting with three questions every leader could get behind: what projects are we actually running, are they on track, and who is working on what? With a globally distributed workforce and external partners folded in, resource visibility alone made a compelling argument.
The rollout caters to different needs across the business. Project managers see their tasks and deadlines. Executives get status updates and the decisions that need their attention. Everything is accessible on mobile. The platform is now available to any Flight Centre team globally under the same enterprise agreement.
Galassi is measured about what comes next. With Smartsheet live for less than a year, he expects the real performance metrics to emerge over the next 12 months. But the foundation, he says, is there – a single source of truth that compresses the time between “where are we” and “what do we need to decide.”
It is, in other words, exactly the kind of unglamorous infrastructure work that tends to show up later in the results.
