T5: Lessons Learned

What actually went wrong in the catastrophic and highly publicised opening of the new Terminal 5 at Heathrow? Was it another systems project failure, but this time a high-profile one?

The impact was first upon people; the passengers whose lives were at the minimum disrupted and at worst seriously blighted.

The impact on British Airways (BA) and British Aiports Authority (BAA), was likewise disastrous, not just in terms of the millions of pounds lost, but in lost reputations as well.

At top-level the cause was reported to be the Baggage Handling System; thousands of pieces of baggage piled up with nowhere to go.

However, reading in and between the lines of Transport Minister Jim Fitzpatrick's 31 March statement in Parliament, the failure was due to a number of things:

• A glitch in the software.
• Lack of coordination between BAA and BA.
• Lack of training.
• Poor planning.
• Lack of people integration on the ground.

Of these, web chat sites have blamed lack of training as the biggest reason for the failure.

It's significant that, out of the five reasons, only one was technology.
The others were down to people, organisation and management.

You can learn a lot from blog sites & comments, one such being Joolie Atkins, who specialises in IT training issues, and whose site with its comments gives us further reasons & insights for the T5 Failure:

• The Big Bang Approach; it should have been phased.
• Inadequate User Acceptance Testing (UAT).
• Lack of Systems Thinking; seeing the Big Picture.
• Lack of senior management involvement.
• No rehearsals; no process testing.

Again, only one of these had anything to do with Technology, which was the UAT - if this can be considered Technology.

So the T5 disaster appears to have had little to do with IT!

One commentator pointed to the re-opening of St Pancras Station (a beautiful example of Victorian architecture in London), and the Eurostar Service to the Continent, which was opened by H.M. The Queen, and went without a hitch. So it can be done, even when you have no option but to use the Big Bang Approach.

So what, as Transport Minister Jim Fitzpatrick asked in his statement before Parliament, are the Lessons To Be Learned?

There is only the space to summarise - what to do next time:

1. Senior management governance & involvement.
2. Join up Business and IT.
3. See the Big Picture.
4. Assure & test the end-to-end business process.
5. Provide quality & early (not tacked-on at the last-minute) training, and on what people need to do the job well.