This state of affairs also had some additional irony, at least for me, as I am an Agile Coach/consultant and had (note past tense) been singing the praise of the T5 project as being one of the best agile projects I’d come across (and to Helen – oops!). A 5 year, £4.3b project which was delivered on time and to budget. Incredible (simply compare it to Wembley stadium …. With my consultant hat on I am intrigued as to how this seemingly successful project has failed so spectacularly, it seems to me to come down to some key points (I have many more but I’ll try and keep it short):

 Testing only shows the presence of bugs, never the absence. So whilst considerable time and expense was made on testing the T5 baggage system, going from testing to a a significant launch (where any defect could affect 100’s of people), does seem quite radical to me. Couldn’t a slow ramp up of the use of T5 been considered rather than lets ‘go for broke’?
 Staff morale – it doesn’t matter what training or processes you put in place – if you have a seriously de-motivated team they will always find reasons why they won’t / can’t do things rather than seek solutions. The fundamental morale problems which appear to be within the core of the BA culture was always going to be serious risk to the T5 launch and was clearly not effectively managed..
 Finally BAA is the owner and operator of T5 and in fact the baggage system which caused the problems. BA are getting it in the neck as BAA doesn’t have a the same kind of public facing profile – oh shall we all start feeling sorry for Willie? No see above point – they are equally as culpable!

Suffice to say, Helen and co ensured that I suffered a lot for my previous lauding of the T5 project and I shall watch with interest to see what emerges as the root cause of the problems.

But I do wish T5 a speedy recovery …

We have a young son, from whom we could only be away for one week, hence our honeymoon was relatively short & every minute very precious. We were attending the Miami Winter Music Conference and had rigorously scanned the events, reserved tickets etc. in advance. The delay to our journey & our luggage meant that we missed the event we had planned to go to on our first evening – the door policy did not allow jeans and that is what we had travelled in. We arrived on Monday night and had to spend most of Tuesday looking for clothes to wear (daytime & evening, not knowing when the bags would pitch up) on a budget of £35 each. Miami WMC is probably one of the most stylish events in the world so you can imagine how I felt literally not having anything to wear!

Our return journey took place on the weekend when the clocks changed, our scheduled connection at 11.15am HAD BEEN RECOMMENDED BY BA DESPITE THE CLOCKS GOING FORWARD MEANING THAT WE ARRIVED IN T5 AT 11.05, NOT 10.05!!!! We had absolutely no chance of catching it, even if the Miami flight had landed on time.

Upon arrival in T5, our connecting flight was delayed meaning it hadn’t left yet – hooray! We went to go through security only to be told that they had cancelled our boarding passes as we hadn’t arrived in time. Of course they had. No-one had thought that the flight might then be delayed, allowing us to board in plenty of time.

So, we were ushered to the customer service queue where around 100+ other passengers were queuing at 17 desks to be given alternative flights. Only 7 of these desks were manned while floor staff milled around forming small huddles and discussing how awful a day they were having. After waiting 30 minutes in this queue, I decided to ask whether any more staff were available to man the desks. ‘They’re all manned’ I was told. Upon correcting the BA lady she said she would find out if anyone was available, but never re-appeared. After waiting a further 15 minutes, I decided that we were going to miss the next connection to Edinburgh (at 13.15) if we didn’t do something. I went for a wander and discovered another queue just round the corner. I started to have grave misgivings so asked a passing BA lady to check that we were definitely waiting in the correct queue. Turned out we weren’t. We had been told to go to customer services for a new flight when in fact we had already been checked onto the 13.15, just nobody had bothered telling us that.

I realised that if we waited in this new queue to get through to board our flight, we would miss it, so I asked if there was anything she could do given we had already waited 45 minutes or more in the wrong queue.

She said and I quote ‘The problem is there are lots of other passengers in your situation so if I did it for you there would be a riot’. We discussed this for several minutes and I offered to try & retrieve my husband from the queue without alerting the other customers as to what was going on (we were desperate to get home to our son by this point!). She agreed so I called to my husband that there was a problem with our luggage and we were escorted out of that queue and through security. We had been chatting to another couple from Edinburgh in the customer service queue and needless to say they never appeared on the 13.15 flight.

Basically, if I hadn’t asked any questions and offered my own solutions to the problem, there is no telling what time we would have made it home.

Shame our bags couldn’t do the same, they still haven’t arrived!