There are lessons to be learned from the Heathrow Airport Terminal 5 debacle which can be applied to many complex projects, including Web sites.

The T5 shambles is a high-profile and very damaging embarrassment. It’s not the only problem of course: Britain’s Heathrow airport has been a major time-bomb for quite some time. In fact, you might question why such a large and expensive facility has been built around an airport which is so chronically short of runway capacity.

The big story this time of course is the fact that despite considerable testing and vast expense, on launch day, Terminal 5 failed spectacularly due to a number of unexpected circumstances which all combined to break the whole facility, and in some style.

This is also what can, and routinely does, happen to complex Web sites on launch day. So what lessons can we learn from this?

  1. Testing is crucial, but it won’t guarantee smooth running from day one.
  2. Usability of all systems, computerised or not, is extremely important. Poor signage at T5 caused confusion and staff, who had received some training, struggled with systems when this proved to be inadequate.
  3. Fix known problems. Issues raised during testing may not have been acted upon. This could be down to poor communication and lax Management. Listen to staff, document all known problems, prioritise issues and deal with them.
  4. Don’t overlook peripheral issues. Many of the T5 problems were compounded by difficulties with side issues such as staff car parking and security bottlenecks. The knock-on effect of these may have been underestimated.
  5. Conduct full-cycle and high load testing. Unit testing is not enough – how everything hangs together is just as important. At T5, there were problems when three different teams of baggage handlers failed to synchronise their activities.
  6. Anticipate potential problems and build-in capacity to deal with them. When the baggage handlers at T5 struggled to cope with the number of items passing through the system, everything backed up and ground to a halt. Ask some ‘what if?’ questions, and work out practical answers.
  7. The consequences of not testing can cost far more than the testing which could have helped avoid the problems in the first place.
  8. When problems develop, communicate with the people who are affected. If you can’t provide any detail, at least reassure people that problems are being dealt with.
  9. Launch with reduced load, ramp it up, monitor the results and make improvements from what you learn as things develop. On launch day, T5 experienced large passenger numbers and a high level of load. Problems escalated quickly to a level beyond which they could not be dealt with. The facility broke and a many people were affected.

This last point is possibly the biggest lesson to learn for Web projects at launch.

Live testing is inevitable

Like it or not, real users will be testing your Web site when it goes live, regardless of how prepared you think you are. Accept this, deal with it and make it a part of your launch process.

Stage traffic buildup and never mailshot large numbers of people in one hit inviting them all to visit a newly launched Web site. Stage your traffic generating activities, monitor the affects on load, errors, user behaviour, etc., then identify areas for improvement and fix the big ones before ramping up your traffic.

With the benefit of hindsight it is easy to criticise those responsible for the Heathrow Terminal 5 shambles. Of course, T5 is a large and complex facility which was only a few different decisions away from working and being hailed as an incredible achievement.

We can learn from this and do more to avoid complex Web projects from suffering a major “T5″ at launch time.