The opening of Terminal 5 was meant to herald a British success story, instead it quickly descended into farce - managers everywhere should heed the lesson of communication
17 April 2008
It was disappointing to see the recent issues at Heathrow’s new Terminal 5. As the days unfolded though it was interesting to see how BA handled the situation, I personally thought there were a lot of parallels we can learn from.
Firstly there was an issue of leadership: on the day the terminal was officially opened all the BA management could be seen as the Queen arrived to open the new facility, even on the morning the terminal opened for passengers management were speaking to the media about all the positives the new terminal would bring, At this point surely someone senior knew things weren’t right? As the day unfolded, and subsequent days, the BA management were conspicuous by their absence and that fuelled the media frenzy.
Rather than a statement from the CEO we were instead confronted with disgruntled passengers and staff (the latter with stories of incomplete training and familiarisation exercises). I am a firm believer that customers will accept bad news provided it is communicated to them, what they will not accept is no communication at all.
Secondly there seemed to be an issue of blame, which can happen when two organisations are involved. Prior to the opening we heard of co-operation between BA and the airport owner BAA whereas when things started to go wrong each party was quick to defend itself and blame the other. A partnership should be for the bad days, not just for the good.
I wonder how important it was that the terminal opened on the particular day, was this just a random date picked out of the air or was there a reason this date was chosen? Too often I have seen projects where everyone works towards a fixed date for no reason other than this was a date that was chosen by the project manager, sponsor or company bosses.
A good project manager will be able to adapt and if necessary revise the date, while this may not be popular it has to be preferable to the chaos and negative publicity we have seen over the last few weeks.
I am sure BA will recover from the setback though and I know there are lots of good people working for the organisation. We must also remember that there were lots of things that went well, not least the impressive structure and indeed many of the facilities that were working on the day, equally there were no doubt many unsung heroes who did their piece to help have the terminal ready and indeed worked hard to put things right afterwards. It’s a shame these people will probably not receive the credit they deserve.
This week at Hallmark we are having a relaunch of the FM team. Over the last few years the team and I have developed to take responsibility for environment, procurement, CSR, training and risk management. Doing all we can within the facilities team to help these new areas we find ourselves, ironically, in a position where the FM team is a little weakened. It’s important that the team were able to recognise this and come up with a plan themselves to put things right and we find ourselves relaunching to the business this week before most of our customers actually realise something is wrong.
Ian Broadbent is director of group property services at Hallmark Cards
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