From December 2019 to March 2021, I worked as Specialist Business Planner at Oman Aviation Group. I led strategic planning work that raised operational efficiency by 15%. I also helped bring digital tools to the group's subsidiaries.
The role
Oman Aviation Group is the country's leading aviation group. It holds a portfolio of aviation businesses. My job was to build business plans and strategic initiatives for the group. The aim was growth and operational excellence across the portfolio.
A group plan is harder than a plan for one company. Each subsidiary has its own market, its own costs and its own management. The group still needs one direction. A business planner sits between the two. You take the group goals and turn them into targets that each company can own.
Where the role sat in my career
I joined from Ernst & Young, where I worked in business development for two years. At EY I brought robotic process automation (RPA) to the Omani market. I also worked on digital transformation projects with several ministries. That work taught me to look for manual steps that software can remove.
I carried that habit into aviation. A plan that depends on manual reports is slow to update. When the data comes from a system, the plan can follow the business month by month. That is why digital tools were part of the planning work itself.
The same year, 2019, I started to lead BHD Group as founder and CEO. So I learned planning in a large group and in a family-owned group at the same time.
What I learned about planning
Efficiency is a planning result. People often treat efficiency as an operations topic. In my experience, it starts in the plan. When the plan names the cost, the owner and the date, waste becomes visible. The 15% gain came from strategic planning work, and the plan is where it began.
A plan needs a few numbers that people act on. A long list of targets spreads attention. A short list, with clear owners, gets used. I apply the same rule today to board scorecards.
Subsidiaries accept tools they can use. A digital tool helps only when the people in each company use it every day. So the tool must fit their work and use data they trust. A tool that adds work for them will not last.
Plans must change when the facts change. My time at the group covered all of 2020. A plan is a starting point. It must be easy to review and update.
What came next
In March 2021 I moved to Oman Broadband as Senior Key Account Manager. Later I joined the Oman Vision 2040 Office on secondment. Today I am Head of Strategic Planning at ITHCA Group. The planning habits from aviation stayed with me in each role.
Today I still start every plan with the same questions. What result do we want? Who owns it? Which system will show us the number each month? Those questions came from my time at Oman Aviation Group.
Related: My experience, Board KPIs that a board can actually use