How did the Heathrow T5 launch go so wrong?

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.

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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.

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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.