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When Terminal 5 at Heathrow opened for business last Thursday, it marked the culmination of what had been the largest construction project in Europe. But when it was switched on, it did not work. As a result, pictures of airline chaos were beamed around the world, Terminal 5 was turned from showpiece to shambles, and the image of British Airways was trashed yet again. Inevitably, that puts BA chief executive Willie Walsh in the firing line. Is he to blame for this fiasco?
One of the oldest rules in business is that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong - as amply illustrated by Terminal 5's opening. The second oldest rule is that judgment is passed not on the mistake but on the recovery: making a mistake need not sink a business, provided it reacts properly to it. Customers have a remarkably high threshold of tolerance for things going wrong. But they rapidly lose all patience with an organisation which seeks to pretend that the surrounding chaos is merely a figment of their fevered imagination
And the third rule is that when something does go wrong, the best thing an organisation can do is admit it, show that it is in control and give the suffering customers as much up-to-date information as possible. So far was British Airways from this that when flights were cancelled last Thursday, the indicator boards instead displayed the cryptic euphemism "refer to airline". Walsh seemed to be in hiding - there for the Queen the previous week but nowhere to be seen when the customers needed him.
Not a good game, then, for the pugnacious Irishman who made his name as a cost-cutter at Aer Lingus and has yet to prove he can think beyond that. He or his organisation failed to plan for the possibility of disaster, they failed to recover from it, and they failed to come clean about it. Three own goals in one match and you begin to question the quality not just of the players but of the team coach.
The great mystery is why he did not see this coming. When Hong Kong opened its glitzy new airport a few years ago, sited so that planes no longer had to weave between the chimney pots to land in the city, it took more than six months to get it to work properly. Closer to home, anyone who has ever opened anything from a chocolate egg factory to a motor car production line knows that even if you have the best equipment in the world it will still need weeks of refinements and adjustments before it begins to work as it should.
Terminal 5 is a people-processing factory. Something on that scale could not possibly go from an activity level of zero to 100 per cent or even 50 per cent in one leap, and it was insane to try it. Business efficiency experts were heard to say ruefully at the end of last week that the real story would have been if Terminal 5 had not had problems.
So what caused the insanity? Here we get nearer to the nature of modern business. There was a time in the age before information technology when organisations had legions of middle management who pushed information-up the chain and pushed instructions down. It was dull, and often they were dull, but it did mean that organisations had a resource of management who were close to the sharp end and understood how the business worked.
When a new project came along, they provided the practical, skilled and experienced people to design it, plan it, and bring it into production with the maximum of real world experience and the minimum of pain.
But in most organisations these people no longer exist. Business has delayered, to use another euphemism - meaning these ranks of middle management have all been fired. Top management gets its information by computer, so most businesses have people at the sharp end dealing with the customer, people at the very top taking the decisions and very little in between.
This also means that when something like Terminal 5 comes along, or even something much more modest, top management has to call in and rely upon external strategists, transition managers, and 100 other kinds of outside consultants to plan it for them.
The catch is that however bright they may be and however skilled they are at drawing lines on paper and computer screen, they have never actually done the job.
It would be wrong to single out BA on this. Customer service has become dire in almost every big business in the country, as organisations opt for money-saving technology at the expense of real people. Call centres work if the problem conforms to the script, but are hopeless if anything out of the ordinary is required.
It is the same with Terminal 5. It did not go according to script and there were not enough people in the front line with the knowledge, leadership skills and authority to sort it out. Armies run on their sergeants. Business does not have sergeants any more - and it shows. This is as true in the US as it is here, as anyone who flies on US airlines can confirm: BA's service may not be what it was, but it is not yet as poor as American's or Delta's.
All that said, there does also seem to have been a huge failure of planning at T5. There can be no excuse for staff not being able to find their car parks, not being able to get through security, not being able to find where they were meant to work because there should have been several dress rehearsals where these things were ironed out.
There can be no excuse for assuming that just because the baggage system worked with one bag, it would work when loaded with 40,000 or an escalator which glides smoothly when empty will work when full.
It was this attention to detail which seems to have been missing. This was not the failure we Brits love to flagellate ourselves for - a failure to be able to manage a big infrastructure project. This was a failure of little things, basic stuff - like showing someone where they had to sit, like making sure there were more than enough people on duty to compensate for those who did get lost.
It was in fact a basic failure of management and a failure of the most basic management. And on those two counts, Walsh has nowhere to hide.
Reader views (1)
Ba and BAA are both to blame for the issues at T5. Instead of criticising Walsh, who has at least been seen on television saying sorry, or BA, whose front webpage simply says "we're sorry", why not moan about BAA. If you look at their Heathrow website there is a mention that BA are having problems but no suggestion at all that their flagship terminal doesn't work - and no apology. Please please go after BAA, not the person who actually sticks his head above the parapet...
- Michael Parker, London, 02/04/2008 11:19
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