Over the last weekend of March, government IT project managers must have emitted a collective sigh of relief. For once, it was not them but one of their private sector counterparts whose catastrophic failure was making the headlines.

The baggage-handling system at Heathrow Airport’s new fifth terminal was to be “one of the hardest-working IT systems in the world”, its operators British Airways (BA) and BAA said before launch. But when the time came, it did not work at all.

Nearly 30,000 items of luggage were lost in just four days, according to government figures. The estimated cost to BA was £50 million.

Early reports suggested that a software glitch had caused the baggage backlog, but the blame was then moved to the lack of familiarity with the system among baggage-handling staff.

“During the inadequate training days prior to the opening, any staff questions were bounced back with ‘I don’t know’ and ‘it will be clear on the day’,” one baggage handler working at Terminal 5 told the BBC.

That two of the UK’s largest corporations cannot successfully implement a greenfield system – albeit a cutting-edge one – so that it works on day one is a damning indictment of the IT project management capabilities of the country, and reveals that the malaise is not confined to government IT projects.

Is it time to admit that – whatever the capabilities of the latest technology – there is an upper complexity limit that constrains IT implementations, beyond which the project management issues become insurmountable?

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IT project management expert and Oxford Fellow Chris Sauer says whatever the causes of the fiasco, it has been handled poorly

It seems that there was not enough testing or training. I passed through T5 three days after it opened, and at the next check-in desk the customer service officer was frantically reading the manual and learning to do such basic things as switch on her ‘Desk Open’ sign.

It was also noteworthy that management’s first reaction was to blame the staff. If BA and BAA had jointly stood up and said ‘This is a management failure: we are activating our contingency plans’, they would have done much to defuse the situation operationally and reputationally.

John Redeyoff, director of information security for project management consultant NCC Group, says businesses keep repeating the same mistakes

Once again, a major project goes horribly wrong, and once again the systems are blamed.

I do not know the specifics of the case, but I wonder if it is yet another of the many major systems implementations that have failed for the same reasons.

Nowadays, it is almost impossible to buy a really poor piece of software, yet we see poor implementations all the time – usually because too much attention has been paid to the technology and all this has done is make poor business processes go faster. They are still poor business processes.

Further reading:

Staggering IT failure at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 Poor staff training implicated in disastrous collapse of baggage handling system.

Privacy fears delay Terminal 5 fingerprint biometrics Airport operator BAA has withdrawn a fingerprint biometrics system from Heathrow’s new fifth terminal

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