T5 and BMCTV

This week I’ve been enjoying the delights of Houston at our HQ, leaving today for Tulsa, Oklahoma where I’ll be presenting at the local User Group.

Fortunately for me my flight from London, whist from Heathrow, was not from the new Terminal 5. A huge sigh of relief was given when I discovered this when checking in on-line.  Now there is an example of the failure of not taking a “life-cycle” approach to service. Whilst I do not know all the specific details, I’d say it’s pretty safe to assume that many of the service elements were tested in silos and not as the integrated whole. Some examples given were that whilst the staff did turn up on the opening day, they could not get into the staff parking area as quickly as normal due to new security equipment. This meant that the staff were queuing up to get parked and not where they should have been within T5. Add to this the failure of the new state of the art baggage handling equipment and you have the disaster we heard on the news. The most worrying element was the lack of contingency plans in the event of a failure of a major business critical process or service. Business continuity management was obviously left aside, to the huge determent of both the British Airports Authorities (BAA), actually owned by the Spanish! British Airways the main customer of T5 and of course as the countries main carrier the whole country received the reputation damage to the extent that questions were tabled in parliament. From this sad warning, please take note and avoid the losses (£16million or $32million after one week) and damage that failing to take a life-cycle approach to services can cause. Whilst ITIL v3 is perceived as being relevant only to IT, the concepts are not, they are relevant to any service, Business, IT or Passenger Terminal! Maybe they should have played our BMC Airport Simulation tool!

Well as always, I’ve been busy and just released 6 BMCTV interviews (top right box) with ITIL Chief Architect Sharon Taylor. The 6 short interviews cover each of the new books, yes including the “Introduction to Service Management” book, and we explore some of the key areas in each book. Check them out when you have time, each one lasts 15mins or less.