Terminal 5 – How it could have been made to work
Not intending to profit from the misfortunes of others, the debacle of terminal 5 is too tempting to pass over, and the designers of this chaos, BAA, have enough media predators hounding them that it is unlikely this low impact shot will be noticed above all the cries for compensation and retribution. Those responsible will be too busy soul-searching to take any real notice of what people are saying beneath their anger as they become increasingly numb to the stones and arrows being thrown by upset customers and press.
So, how could a system, which was supposedly tested by 15,000 people over a 6 month period, have failed so miserably on day one? I am sure that technology and resource planning will bear most of the brunt, and the fingers of blame will find their scapegoats, and that BAA execs will still receive a fat bonus – a habitual pattern these days where results and remuneration have little impact on key decision-makers.
Contrast this to a project of similar complexity which resulted in 100% on-time, to budget and fully operational from day one. I cast my mind back a number of years to the project to move over 2,000 Banc Paribas staff from many locations around London to one new site at Marylebone.
The challenge set to the project manager, David Robinson of Computacenter, was that every one of the 2,000 employees should be able to leave their current location on Friday evening and arrive at the new office on Monday morning starting work as if nothing had changed. So network connections, telephone numbers, passwords, log in names, group memberships and all connectivity had to be exactly the same for every one of the 2,000. A team of 20 support analysts, plus cabling and network technicians completed the work on time and to plan. All together there were in excess of 10,000 items of equipment to be moved, reinstalled, configured and tested.
So, what contributed to the success of this project? The usual project management methods were applied and a schedule with critical path analysis and milestones created. Project briefings were undertaken and a highly detailed plan emerged with clear task responsibilities. But all this is no different to any other project. The difference in this case (and if you’re a BAA project manager stay tuned in here), is the exercises we ran with the project team which gave them the benefit of pseudo-hindsight.
The team were taken through a series of NLP visualisation and future pacing exercises, as if the project had been completed with 100% success. The realisations the team arrived at opened up new areas of attention and focus unseen on the project plan. With this new insight they came up with six key actions which would absolutely guarantee a high success rate. Everyone involved agreed that none of this would have emerged from a computerised project plan. The techniques used stimulated experience and imagination to create new options, rather than purely intellectual thinking which produces a project plan similar to the last one. The six key actions had a mix of pro-active elements and contingency actions to a number of possible ‘what-if’ scenarios.
Terminal 5 is clearly a much bigger and more complex project than the Banc Paribas relocation, but the same principles of project management apply none-the-less. With 13 years of planning, a 4 year public enquiry, and 15,000 volunteers testing it out, you might ask ‘what else could they have done?’ The £4.3bn terminal 5 project blunder will resound in project management journals for years to come I have no doubt. With all the resources available to BAA you have to ask how they were able to make such a mess of things. Like you, we shall be watching the publicly aired debrief closely for the answer to this question.
