An aviation assessment platform where access follows the shape of the organisation

The problem

A specialist consultancy runs structured safety and organisational audits for airlines. Some of these are surveys; others are line observations, where an assessor records what happens flight by flight against a strict methodology. All of that expertise lived in manual processes and spreadsheets, and the brief was to turn it into software without losing any of the rigour that makes it worth paying for.

The risk

Survey tools are easy to build badly. If a survey can be edited once results exist, past results stop being comparable and nobody can say for certain what a respondent actually answered. If observations are recorded as free text, the data cannot be analysed with any confidence. And if access is simply a flat list of users with roles, it is only a matter of time before someone at one base sees another airline’s audit results.

In safety work, that last one would be a serious breach of trust, of the sort that ends a relationship with a client (and quite rightly so).

The decision

We made the rules part of the structure, so that the software cannot record invalid data. Surveys are versioned trees of questions, with conditional logic and calculated fields, and once results exist against a survey it is superseded rather than edited. Observation sequences are built from typed events, with a transition graph (a map of which event may follow which) deciding what can be recorded next, so every sequence that is saved is a valid one.

Access follows the shape of the client’s own organisation, so granting someone access to an airline covers the fleets and bases beneath it. Visibility is enforced with global query scopes, which means records a user is not allowed to see are never loaded in the first place. Permissions are generated as surveys, units and sessions are created, the management screen shows where each grant comes from, and every create, update and delete on key records is logged with its old and new values.

Each session moves through a clear workflow (responded, submitted, evaluated, closed). We were careful about one detail in particular: evaluators record their own answers alongside the originals instead of overwriting them, because the difference between what the crew said and what the evaluator concluded is often the most useful thing in the data.

The outcome

The consultancy’s methodology now runs as software that respects the structure of the organisations using it. Dashboards and Excel reports let each organisation drill from a chart straight to the session and question behind it, with results normalised so that groups can be compared fairly. The engine was designed from the start so that it could be extended into other regulated sectors.