We sat down with Harry Snoxell, Program Planning & Operations Senior Manager at Wisk Aero, to hear how the company building a fully autonomous air taxi outgrew Microsoft Project, what changed once Planisware became the heartbeat of the program, and why the AI worth having is the AI you can use today.
Wisk Aero is chasing a first: it intends to be the first manufacturer to take a fully autonomous, all-electric passenger aircraft through FAA certification. That mission sits at an unusual intersection. One side of the house moves at software speed. The other carries the full weight of aerospace certification. Both run on the same schedule.
Holding both of those worlds to one plan is Harry Snoxell, Program Planning & Operations Senior Manager at Wisk. "It is not a huge company, but it is not a tiny company. I think it is just right. It allows you to be flexible and move quickly," he says.
Moving quickly is exactly what the old toolset could not do.
At Planisware Exchange26, Harry sat down with Greg Chrzastek, Chief Customer Officer at Planisware, to talk about what Wisk outgrew, what changed after the move, and where AI genuinely earns its place in program management.
See what it looks like when Planisware becomes the heartbeat of a program. Watch the full conversation below.
Wisk Aero Customer Story
A schedule that outgrew the tool
Harry spent his career in program management at Boeing before coming to Wisk. When he arrived, Wisk was running on Microsoft Project, and he was one of the people put in charge of replacing it.
"We originally were using Microsoft Project, and we had some pain points," he says. "We were not having a great time, so we were looking for a new tool."
Some of that pain was mechanical: crashing files, problems with access, no connection to Jira. Synchronizing hardware, software, supply chain and flight testing across a 4,000 line integrated master schedule was pushing the tool past what it was built for. But the deeper problem was that the system could not be changed.
"It felt like you were working with someone behind a closed door. I could not talk to anyone. I could not customize anything." Harry Snoxell, Program Planning & Operations Senior Manager, Wisk Aero
An open door, and people behind it
Wisk evaluated the market and chose Planisware. What changed things was the first six months, when the Planisware team configured the platform around the way Wisk actually works.
"They were configuring for us. They customized so many different things for us, and that was amazing. That was such a good first step," Harry says. "It really opened the door in my mind. Oh, we can do pretty much anything in this." The contrast with what he had before is not only the feature set. It is having people on the other end of the line: "I have contacts, and they are so responsive and easy to work with, and they can help us build all these things."
That working relationship also left room for Wisk's own ideas. Alongside the configuration work came a Driver Analysis view that groups near-critical paths so leadership can see where the margin for error has gone to zero, and a two-way Jira integration that removed the manual reconciliation blocking a weekly status cadence across the program. "Now I have access to build these various different functions, which is just so freeing," Harry says.
"The heartbeat of the program"
"Planisware is basically the heartbeat of the program. Everyone at the company is using it for various different uses. It really is the engine of all of the scheduling and planning that we do."
Scheduling is the center of gravity, with resource tracking and cost management alongside it. One capability comes up unprompted: Monte Carlo analysis, which Wisk did not have before. "That is really great in helping with our planning and scheduling and forecasting, having that good risk information."
Just as important is what Wisk has not had to buy. "As we start to mature and move into other areas of the PPM tool, just knowing that Planisware has that functionality, we do not have to consider using another tool."
AI that is real today
When the conversation turned to AI, Harry pushed back on the framing before answering the question.
"People think AI is this general AI that is going to solve everyone's problems immediately, and that is just not the case. But that obfuscates the fact that there is so much functionality we can use today."
Wisk has a name for the problem worth solving: the translation gap. Brilliant engineers need answers out of the schedule, and a small planning team becomes the bottleneck between them and the data. What is closing it is one interface rather than a set of tools. Oscar, the team's agent, sits in front of different use cases.
The first is already operational. Oscar is trained on the scripts from Wisk's own Planisware training packages, so a user with a question no longer has to queue for the planning team. "If someone has a question, they do not need to come to the planning team, the PMO office. They can just talk to the AI bot." Harry is deliberate about how modest that is: "It is a really simple thing. But it allows these people to get information they would not have had before."
The second is still a prototype, and it comes at the same gap from the other side: getting someone who has never opened Planisware to a useful answer. "Just allowing someone who has not used Planisware before to operate and have some functionality that they would not have been able to use is really appealing," Harry says. "It is bridging that little gap and helping someone who is maybe intimidated by the tool gain access to this functionality."
Neither is speculative, and that is his point. "It is just these entry-level, easy-to-implement things that AI is doing today that we can leverage. We do not have to start thinking so far in the future."
Advice for the teams about to start
Asked what he would tell peers beginning the same journey, Harry gives an answer about people rather than technology. "Start small, do not over-promise, and really be empathetic about where people are coming from," he says. "People are concerned about losing their jobs and being replaced. So address that. What are their pain points?"
"You only have one chance to make a first impression, and AI can be such a hot-button, divisive issue. If you over-promise, it can crumble, and then you lose the buy-in."
"What Wisk is doing with AI in the context of program management is cutting edge. You are leading the pack," Greg Chrzastek told him as the conversation closed. "Every other customer is going to follow you within the next one to two years."
