When on time and on budget is not enough

You can't help feeling sorry for Willie Walsh, the chief executive of British Airways. The grand opening of Terminal 5 at Heathrow airport has been very much in the news recently - and not in a good way. The press has been full of stories of cancelled flights, chaotic check-in, lost luggage, and frustrated passengers. It has become another example to British flagellants of the country's decline. Parallels are drawn with other recent major infrastructure projects and over all of them looms the impending embarrassment of the 2012 Olympics in London.

Yet reading around the subject, there is so much that went right with this project. It was technically very challenging - the largest single span structure in Europe; it involved 60 contractors, 16 major projects and 147 sub-projects. And it was on time and on budget! Planning alone spanned 14 years. See this airport-industry web site article for more details.

So why was the launch so bad. Until some authoritative reports are published, we - along with so many others - can only speculate. Many pundits blame inherent over-optimism as an unavoidable human trait, particularly where political influences are at work: it's not a problem with technical project management, it's psychological deficiencies. Or it could be the number of stake-holders involved: I heard one estimate of over a hundred stake-holder groups. It is possible that it was lack of testing: it was simply not appreciated how the various systems would perform under full load. The testing phase was scheduled to run for 6 months prior to opening and involve 16,000 volunteers including 4 full scale tests. But 16,000 is far short of the design target of 27 million passengers a year for the new terminal and ordinary passengers have a habit of being far less orderly than regular volunteers.

We shall have to wait for the final 'lessons learned', but one immediate lesson which we should all know is 'be rigorous about risk management'. Remember, Murphy was an optimist.