Key points about Terminal 5 project:
- Massive project (biggest in Europe at the time)
- Set up in multidisciplinary groups to encourage innovation rather than blaming other areas
- Delivered on time and budget - a major achievement for such a project
- First week was then a disaster
- Key lessons: you cannot test for everything so build in some slack (at T5, they were so confident that they started off at almost full capacity. Some staff and passengers could not find car parks so were late, some staff could not then log on to systems as some test data left in - as little spare capacity, minor problems then caused major problems).
Much more about this project is available here.
Key general points
Project risk can be broken down into 3 main types:
Structural risk:
It's a big project - risk reduced by good planning and control.
Socio-political risk:
It has people involved - stakeholder relationships become very important to manage expectations and keep people working together rather than 'blame shifting'.
Emerging Complexity:
The unknown unknown. This can be reduced by sharing information eg using web to have single master plan rather than some people working on out of date paper plans. Need to be aware of this risk and have people looking for problems with capacity (resource and time) built in to deal with problems.
