A Tale of Two Terminals: Beijing Terminal 3 and Heathrow Terminal 5

http://www.leanessays.com/2011/01/tale-of-two-terminals.html

by admp • 16 years ago

69 33 16 years ago

leanessays.com

ojbyrne• 16 years ago

I found it weird that Deming wasn't mentioned anywhere in the second half of the article.

cubicle67• 16 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming for anyone who doesn't get the reference

His work was mainly concerned with manufacturing/production, but is still (I think) well worth reading

Edited to add Deming's Seven Deadly Diseases as I think they're worth quoting here for those who don't wish to read the entire wikipedia article

The "Seven Deadly Diseases" include:

  Lack of constancy of purpose
  Emphasis on short-term profits
  Evaluation by performance, merit rating, or annual review of performance
  Mobility of management
  Running a company on visible figures alone
  Excessive medical costs
  Excessive costs of warranty, fueled by lawyers who work for contingency fees

"A Lesser Category of Obstacles" includes

  Neglecting long-range planning
  Relying on technology to solve problems
  Seeking examples to follow rather than developing solutions
  Excuses, such as "our problems are different"
  Obsolescence in school that management skill can be taught in classes
  Reliance on quality control departments rather than management, supervisors, 
    managers of purchasing, and production workers
  Placing blame on workforces who are only responsible for 15% of mistakes where 
    the system desired by management is responsible for 85% of the unintended 
    consequences
  Relying on quality inspection rather than improving product quality

forensic2• 16 years ago

The only real thing he studied in this comparison is rehearsal and timing.

The British death marched to an unrealistically optimistic date while the Chinese were finished and testing long before the ship date.

Socio-technical systems theory is interesting but he doesn't explain how the Chinese did this better. The Chinese aren't exactly known for empowering their workers.

sp332• 16 years ago

If the workers aren't empowered, the success of the project is up to the leaders. Apparently the Chinese manager was more competent than the British one.

forensic2• 16 years ago

>If the workers aren't empowered, the success of the project is up to the leaders.

This statement contradicts the findings of socio-techical systems theory.

STS shows that competent leaders are leaders who empower their subordinates - this usually achieves better results than command and control.

te_chris• 16 years ago

Agree, he successfully pointed out that Heathrow management entirely ignored the objections from the people who would have to implement the policies, but doesn't compare how these worker/management interactions were handled in Beijing - my guess: the process probably sucked just as much, it was just enforced in the most authoritarian way possible.

icegreentea• 16 years ago

Well, systems theory in general is more or less accepted as 'correct'. As in, you'd be a fool to design any large scale project without looking at systems theory.

It's true that the author didn't go very much into detail into the Chinese vs British thing. In fact, I believe that the whole thing just served more as a hook for the meat of the piece (systems theory).

But anyhow, strictly speaking, when dealing with complex systems, you don't -need- super empowered individual workers. You just need empowered sub-units (with the lowest level as possible), and in general the smaller the sub-unit (all the way down to the individual... sometimes) will make your system more robust (and possibly more efficient). So in theory, you're lowest empowered sub-unit could just have a single manager/leader who still holds all the authority, while all the remaining team members are 'merely' well rehearsed and trained.

So in the case of the Chinese, you could just have empowered managers leading smallish work teams who are 'just' technically sound. Which seems to fit the stereotype good enough I guess.

And on the side, one of the wondrous things about systems theory is that it applies as much to the thing you're building as well as the process to build it. You can have an end product that when finally done preform beautifully from a system's standpoint (robust, efficient, adaptable, etc etc), but development be an utter hellhole (and the reverse).

salvadors• 16 years ago

s/he/she/

http://www.blogger.com/profile/01193243920681352112

willyt• 16 years ago

Also compare Heathrow Terminal 5 with Madrid Barajas latest terminal. Both designed by the same British architectural firm, Barajas took about half the time to build, cost less and is an uncompromised design.

gpjt• 16 years ago

Hmm. Last time I was at the new terminal at Barajas, they had announcements every two minutes explaining that for purposes of making the terminal a peaceful environment they don't do announcements.

The building's nice, though.

stoney2• 16 years ago

I'm not sure how fair the cost comparison is. At the time, pretty much anything would have cost less in Spain - Britain was very expensive due to the high pound. A bit different now though.

kiujhygthyujik3• 16 years ago

Heathrow was built at the peak of the UK housing boom - the stories of rates paid to electricians and plumbers at Heathrow made bankers blush.

jlees• 16 years ago

A lot of the second half of this article could be summarised as "Think about people if your software/system/airport involves them." However, I'm not entirely convinced by her argument that this was the main flaw. Release without thorough testing and stupid bugs (not removing a safety patch) seem more to blame.

kiujhygthyujik3• 16 years ago

Well one was built by a state elite gerontocracy who have centuries of being in charge and an utter contempt for the workers building the terminal and the ultimate users.

and the other was buill by the chinese

apower• 16 years ago

Wow, nice twist. Didn't expect that at the end. Nice garden path sentences.

ryanwaggoner• 16 years ago

Not really, as garden path sentences are more about incorrect parsing of structure, rather than interpreting the meaning of the sentence to be something else. For example, reading the first sentence above, you can get all the way to the end without having re-evaluate the sentence from the beginning. It's only when you read the 2nd sentence that you realize that the writer was implying something different than you first thought.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence

/pedantry

maxklein• 16 years ago

China is successful with these things because they have a large number of excess staff, and the staff are very obedient. Britain typically has too few staff, and the staff are very independent.

A person who has been to a chinese restaurant in china will understand the difference.

sabj2• 16 years ago

Service industries in China can't be expected to be superior based on their personnel numbers alone. Cultural paradigms can produce good and bad results - as when poorly paid workers with no expectations of tips and customers accustomed to certain things lead to a custom where to summon waistaff all you can do is loudly yell '服务员'...

waterside81• 16 years ago

服务员 means "Waiter" - thank you Google Translate!

garply2• 16 years ago

I've lived in Beijing for years, and I have to say Chinese restaurant service is on the whole pretty horrible compared to restaurant service in societies with tipping.

anto1ne2• 16 years ago

can't agree more with this, even in high-end places, service is awful. But I don't think tipping has anything to do with it.

drinian• 16 years ago

While it's a good, didactic article, it is very much worth noting that she doesn't have much to say about Beijing's design processes. Presumably they are much more opaque than the UK's. How are the two terminals doing now, comparatively?

smutticus• 16 years ago

Heathrow is a mess. Everyone who travels regularly to southern England does everything they can to avoid it when flying.

I don't know anything about this airport in Beijing. But comparing airports to Heathrow is just too easy. Any airport would look well managed compared to Heathrow.

ig1• 16 years ago

I disagree, City's better if you're coming from Europe, but Heathrow still the best airport to get into London from anywhere else, especially Terminal 5. T5 had a lot of problems when it started, but now it's by far the best major airport terminal I've flown from.

It takes me less than 15 minutes to get from the T5 tube station to sitting in the departure lounge waiting for boarding. It's almost as good as Eurostar.

(Although if you're from outside London it can be easier to get to Gatwick transport-wise)

stoney2• 16 years ago

I agree that T5 is pretty decent. The queues are short and there's lots of seating. Access by car is pretty decent if you're on that side of London (which most of the country is). Pretty much all I care about.

I generally try to avoid Heathrow T3 though (and T2 and T4 never seem to have flights to where I want to go).

stevenbedrick• 16 years ago

T5's not awful, or anything, except for one thing: power outlets, or, actually, the extreme lack thereof. There are very few places you can sit while simultaneously charging your laptop and keeping an eye on the departure board.

garply2• 16 years ago

Never been to Heathrow, but flown in and out of BJ Terminal 3 many times. It looks nice and modern and feels comfortable, but I and everyone I know hate traveling through it. It's so fucking huge, it takes forever to get around. And it seems to have been laid out in a way that requires extra walking / tram-riding than necessary for the amount of air traffic. I always got the impression that it was specifically designed to convey a sense of grandiosity to foreigners first coming to China: "Wow, what a modern and epically large airport, this must really be a globally important city."

anarchitect• 16 years ago

This is true of Heathrow's terminals 1-4, but I've found T5 to be flawless on the times I've been through.

sabj2• 16 years ago

This isn't really a fair comparison, as has been noted elsewhere here. Heathrow is an exceptionally poor example of airport construction and operation. There were fewer constraints at hand in the construction of the new Beijing terminal as well - so if thing X went wrong, I think there was probably less ability to delay matters.

bane• 16 years ago

Last time I flew through Heathrow, I spent an hour and a half going from one gate to another, moving about on literally every kind of transport known to man except watercraft and spaceships. After flying in on an aircraft, I took some combination of train, bus, electric cart, another bus, I think another train, moving sidewalk, and at least one or two other things.

Nearly half of the transit time was spent inside some kind of vehicle in a dark tunnel, an industrial looking processing center, crawling around dimly lit stairwells, and or other such place that clearly said to me "you should not be seeing this stuff! Pay no attention to all this stuff behind the curtains!"

It was ridiculous and absurd and would have been humorous if I hadn't been in a mad dash the entire time trying to make my connection.

After escaping on yet another aircraft I mulled for quite a while over what kind of madness could have come up with such an absolutely insane way of moving from one part of a facility to another...a distance I could have crossed by foot in less than 15 minutes.

kiujhygthyujik3• 16 years ago

The story is a good example of why these projects fail in the UK and the USA.

Leaving aside the staff problems - British Airports Authority (who run Heathrow) and the RMT (Rail maritime and Transport workers union) have a history of confrontation which makes the whole Isreali-Palestinian thing look like a family game of scrabble.

Just to pick one example, the software was left in debug mode. Everybody knew this but it took 3 days to find the person with the contractual permission to tell them to turn debugging off. Not for any technical reason but just because everything was done by such a mesh of semi-privatized companies, contractors, sub-contractors, outsourcers etc that nobody knew who was in charge.

The UK has just abandoned an ID card scheme setup by the previous government. It's costing 20m quid to just work out how has done what, and who is owed what in order to shut the project down.

anto1ne2• 16 years ago

I don't know about Heathrow-5 but I can tell about Beijing-3, and I think everyone telling it's a great airport has no clue. The flows are terrible, you often board at the farthest gate away, sometimes by buses, even though most of gates are empty, and most of the airport is empty (the middle part is still closed but the international part is further away). The customs bottleneck is the worst ever, it's not uncommon to wait 45mins, there's like 12 counters for all international arrivals. The building does actually look like the bottleneck, and it is. The waiting areas have nothing special, and they certainly feel old for a 2 years old airport. Some of the duty-free shops looks untouched since the 80s.. The roof already starts to fall apart, there was some parts ripped off by the wind lately, and there's concern about the build quality.

And well, it's unfair to compare cost and construction time, one was built by thousands of workers, working 24/7 for a minimum wage, the other... And btw, Beijing T3 was designed by a dutch consortium and a British architect.

Charuru• 16 years ago

Gaius Marius figured this out. As did Napoleon.

A Tale of Two Terminals: Beijing Terminal 3 and Heathrow Terminal 5

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