By Tim Ferguson, 28 March 2008 17:39
COMMENT
To many, the travails of Heathrow's new Terminal 5 (T5) won't come as a huge surprise with the airport's infamous delays, lost baggage and struggling infrastructure often making the headlines.
But T5 promised to be different. British Airways (BA) and BAA spent five years and £4.3bn on the huge project using the opportunity building a brand new terminal in order to change the way things were done at Heathrow for the better.
All the tech at Heathrow T5
Video: Heathrow T5's cutting-edge baggage tech
Video: Heathrow Terminal 5 uncovered
Photos: Passenger's eye view of Heathrow Terminal 5
Photos: Inside Heathrow's Terminal 5
Photos: Heathrow's Terminal 5 comes alive
Photos: Technology at the heart of Terminal 5
Having visited the terminal myself several times in the months before T5's opening and interviewing the people who have dedicated years of their lives to the project, I'm amazed BA got it so wrong on opening day - the chaos forcing the airline's CEO Willie Walsh to publicly apologise and admit it was "definitely not British Airways' finest hour".
In the run up to the opening of T5 there were overnight baggage-systems tests using thousands of bags and full trials of the check-in procedure and IT systems.
The demos I watched of the state-of-the-art systems and technology were extremely impressive and, following extensive testing, it all seemed pretty much ready to go several weeks (and in some cases months) in advance of its opening on 27 March.
Wi-fi at the airport
Got your own views on Heathrow? Share them with fellow passengers at atlarge.com...
But the question now has to be asked: is it really possible for conditions in a fully operational terminal to be accurately simulated without real customers and the demands of operating a huge and complex infrastructure? Despite the extensive testing, it seems the realities and vagaries of operating an airport terminal of such scale and with so much new thinking are virtually impossible to fully replicate, and T5 has fallen foul of this simple fact.
The exact reasons for the problems over the last few days aren't entirely clear but they seem to have stemmed from a combination of issues such as car parking and staff getting to grips with new systems, rather than the actual technology itself.
BA CIO Paul Coby has consistently said T5 was more a business transformation project than an IT one - meaning the challenge was always going to centre on processes and people.
Ironically, it seems this is where BA has fallen short. While the gleaming terminal building and technology were ready to roll, the processes and people obviously weren't quite as well prepared.
In its defence, the airline has stressed the operational move to T5 was "one of the most complex and largest airport moves in history" which perhaps goes some way to explaining why some elements didn't run as smoothly as they could. But while a few gremlins could have been expected, the actual problems must rank more on the 'worst case scenario' list of things that could have gone wrong.
The rather inauspicious start to the operational life of Heathrow's Terminal 5 (T5) has been sad to see after the optimism that surrounded the huge project from all concerned.
The hope now - both for passengers and BA and BAA - is that these issues are resolved as quickly as possible and T5 goes on to become the resounding success story it has been touted as.
BA's Walsh pointed out the airline will be in T5 for the next 40 years and pleaded with people not to judge it on its first few days. Though it's going to be hard to shake the monkey of the opening day chaos from its back - with people already lumping the £4.3bn T5 in with the other high profile British engineering flops such as the Millennium Dome.
As with many government IT project disasters in recent years, the big lesson to be learnt from the T5 debacle is that the people and processes are as important - if not more so - than the technology.
A stark contrast to the problems with the T5 opening was the success of the project to build the new rail terminal at St Pancras in London - more of that here.
But ultimately the T5 saga also goes to show that however much attention to detail is paid, often no one really knows how such a massive and complex infrastructure will work until it's exposed to the real world - and that's a nervous feeling many CIOs and business executives will be familiar with.
So the champagne may have gone a little flat for now but I've no doubt in the long term T5 will be a success - I've seen first hand the vision of how it should work. It may just take some time to get there.
Comments
There are 12 comments. Join the discussion
1. anonymous
My colleague was on a flight to Vancouver yesterday and had to leave (and arrive) for a week's skiing without any luggage.
As a firm that specialises in customer engagement and advocacy we're interested in what the long-term effect of this will be for BA - bad experiences like this are spoken about a lot more than good ones!
2. Peter Croft
You correspondent's comment that "no one really knows how such a massive and complex infrastructure will work until it's exposed to the real world" shows the kind of thinking that causes these disasters.
It didn't work because it wasn't tested properly - it really is that simple.
3. Roger Huffadine
The devil is in the detail - I'm certain that there were "coalface" workers who told everyone who would listen that these exact problems existed. It's always the case that middle managers hide the truth from senior managers resulting in cock-ups that carry huge consequences.
Having once experienced the information isolation problem that besets directors I invented the management-by-wandering-about technique - long before the book of the same name.
4. anonymous
Doing a band-playing, big-bang move of so many flights and services to the new terminal was a fool-hardy move in the first place - they should have trickled stuff into it over six months. Thank God, the long-haul stuff has not moved yet.
A train-wreck of a migration plan, always likely to fail, and driven by BA marketing puff or how great we are, and come and look at our swanky new terminal.
Did they not learn anything from the new airport disasters at Denver and Hong Kong? Surely they studied these in detail?
5. Ian Sargent
Perhaps BA and BAA were a tad over-ambitious in transferring all BA operations to the new terminal in one go.
It would have made more sense to transfer over one group of services - for example, the trans-Atlantics. When the terminal was proved to be OK with that then the other services could have been moved over in stages.
6. anonymous
I was astonished that BA and BAA made a once-for-all switch to T5. Surely all project management logic says that the switch should have been phased, starting with a few flights a day, and ramping up as an when bugs were ironed out. Sounds to me more like a case of invincibility syndrome than proper planning.
7. David Gaskill
"But ultimately the T5 saga also goes to show that however much attention to detail is paid, often no one really knows how such a massive and complex infrastructure will work until it's exposed to the real world"
That is self-evidently true but you don't just a launch a ship and hope that it won't sink.
When within hours of opening the system crashes in flames and it is going to take hundreds of extra workers anything up to a week to trawl through the wreckage and reunite passengers with their luggage, there must have been real failings in the planning, commissioning and testing of the system.
8. anonymous
All the technology was, I believe, fully tested to cope with the expected volumes when BA have moved its complete traffic to T5 - except for actually delivering cases to and from planes.
We are only halfway there and it isn't coping. However, I did hear that it isn't so much that the technology that's at fault but maybe possibly the good old baggage handlers. Do they have a vested interest, as BA does, in making T5 work?
9. Karen Challinor
It might have helped if BAA had budgeted more time for testing the system before the deadline.
10. Jack Winogrodzki
While Atlanta successfully managed to open a new airport for the Olympics and Hong Kong and Madrid have opened in spectacular fashion we Brits are looking sadly lacking.
How on Earth can we stage the Olympics in 2012 without becoming a laughing stock? It is all down to British management.
11. George
Simply poor management.
From what I've heard, many people did flag up the problems with the baggage system. It was clearly not well enough tested and debugged.
But managers tend to keep to deadlines whether systems are working or not, otherwise it would look like their failure.
If it was down to people not technology, as this article seems to imply, then who was responsible for training them sufficiently? That's right, the management.
They've reaped what they have sowed.
12. anonymous
Testing on the basis that the handling would be efficient was a serious mistake, perhaps?