If you manage a drone program inside a large organization, you know the challenges that poses. Regulation shift, vendors discontinue the drone your whole fleet is built around, or an essential drone model ages out faster than budget allows for replacement. Suddenly the workflow you spent months refining has to be rebuilt, while leadership still expects the same compliance, uptime, and confidence they had yesterday.

Change is a permanent feature of the drone industry, not a temporary inconvenience. The problem is that most program workflows are designed for a static world: one platform, one set of rules, one approval path. When any piece of that moves, the whole process must be reconstructed from scratch, and that reconstruction is expensive, slow, and exhausting for everyone who depends on the program running smoothly.

There's a better way to build, where change is expected and designed for, not treated as an exception that breaks the plan. To discuss this, Commercial UAV News is hosting a free webinar entitled Building a Resilient Drone Program Workflow on September 22, at 1:00 PM EST.

This 60-minute webinar is built for drone project managers who carry the dual responsibility of keeping operations compliant and keeping stakeholders confident, even as the ground shifts underneath them. We'll walk through a practical framework covering four areas where resilience actually gets built or lost:

Designing for change, not around it. Instead of a single rigid path, workflows can include built-in flexibility points or areas where the process can bend without breaking.

Regulatory resilience. Documentation, training, and approval processes can be structured so that a new rule means an update, not a rebuild.

Aircraft availability contingencies. Reducing dependency on any single platform, and building real fallback paths into ops planning, so a discontinued aircraft or delayed vendor shipment doesn't stall the entire program.

Communicating workflow health upward. Leadership wants assurances that the program is stable and adaptable. We'll cover how to show that, not just say it.

Bringing this framework to life are four panelists who deal  with these issues every day. Brian Owens from The Weitz Company has scaled a nationwide drone program beyond 50 pilots and secured a National BVLOS waiver. Garrett Connolly of MassDOT Aeronautics has spent over a decade training drone pilots across public safety and federal agencies, and now runs a statewide UAS training program. Ania Burgess of Altimetis is a systems engineer who designs the site selection, integration, and communications infrastructure that determines whether autonomous systems scale past a pilot program. And Woody Duncan of Aegean Energy Group brings two decades of GIS and compliance experience across energy and environmental projects, now operating at the SVP level where technology decisions meet leadership expectations.

Whether you're standing up a drone program from scratch or trying to future-proof one that already exists, this session is designed to leave you with a workflow framework that holds up not just for today, but as the landscape keeps moving around you.

Can’t make the live webinar? Register anyway and we will send you the recording.