The Environmental Data Team That Made Wait Time Visible
Updated: Aug 24
Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA) delivers atmospheric and Earth observation data services for the benefit of science and society.
It’s complex, valuable work. But when we began working with the organisation, the biggest opportunity wasn’t in the science or technology. It was hidden in the delivery process.
Finding Clarity
Running a health check across CEDA’s wider team of more than 40 people revealed a committed group with strong management support and autonomy. But three areas stood out:
Only 15% felt positively about processes and ways of working
Just 7% felt positively about delivery speed
Only 39% felt clear about CEDA’s mission and their contribution to it
This wasn’t an effort problem. People were already working hard, but work was spread across too many projects, priorities weren’t visible in one place, and different parts of the organisation worked in different ways.
Rather than change everything at once, we focused on one project team of around seven people, and some targeted work with the leadership team of 5.
Taking Action
With the project team (working on the ESA Climate Change Initiative's Open Data Portal providing free and open access to high-quality satellite-derived climate datasets) we mapped the full E2E journey of a data set, separating active working time from the waiting between steps. That distinction mattered. A few days of work could still take months to complete when looking at the full picture.
The project team introduced:
A monthly planning and review cadence
A visible, prioritised list of improvement experiments to reduce lead time
The leadership team:
Documented its mission and strategic themes
Introduced a go/no-go process for new work
Constrained individual capacity to a maximum of two projects per person, and an 85% capacity limit to reduce overload and context switching
These were simple changes. But they made the work, priorities and bottlenecks much easier to see.
Seeing the Results
Between October 2024 and March 2025, the project team reduced the lead time for publishing a data set from 109 days to 67.5 days. That’s a 38% improvement.
The team also removed around 8.5 days of active work time from the process. CEDA estimated this was worth:
Around £5,300 per data set
At least £127,000 a year (based on 24 data-sets a year)
At least £381,000 over the three-year project
The volume of data processed also increased 6X - from 54,000 files to 333,000 being processed each quarter.
Whilst these figures relate to one seven-person project team, the wider health check across the full organisation showed that change was taking root across CEDA too.
After six months:
Overall positive sentiment improved by 23% ⬆️
Clarity around the mission rose 45% ⬆️
Sentiment about speed improved by 32% ⬆️
Sentiment about the ways or working improved by 18% ⬆️
Making Improvement Part of the Work
The aim wasn’t to make one project faster. It was to leave CEDA with practical ways to keep improving without relying on us.
A Repeatable Method for Project Teams
The CCI KE team now has a method that can be applied to other projects:
Map the full process
Separate active work from waiting time
Identify the biggest bottlenecks
Create and prioritise improvement work
Protect the capacity needed to deliver it
Review progress through a regular planning cadence
The project showed what this approach can achieve: shorter lead times, lower delivery costs and greater capacity.
Better Prioritisation for the Leadership Team
For CEDA’s leaders, the change was about making clearer choices.
The management Kanban created a shared view of priorities and work in progress. The go/no-go process made decisions about new projects more deliberate. The 85% capacity limit and two-project maximum helped leaders balance demand with the team’s real capacity.
Together, these practices gave leaders a better way to decide what to start, what to stop and where to focus attention.
That matters because continuous improvement rarely fails through a lack of ideas. It fails when teams take on too much and improvement is squeezed in around delivery.
CEDA began changing that by making improvement part of the work itself.
Because delays rarely sit inside the specialist work. They hide between steps, priorities and people.
If that sounds familiar in your organisation, we’d welcome the conversation. Book a call.
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