Travel technology isn’t a spectator sport – more on Ryanair upgrade

Making major changes to a travel reservation system is hard work for all involved. I know – I have project managed quite a few in my time.

To give you a sense of scale, one project I PMed for a leading UK tour operator took 8 months from start of planning to go live…. and involved over 50 IT, commercial, ecommerce and legal people. And that was just for a new holiday search! (OK, search is important, I know that)

However, one thing that I have learnt from all of my reservation system change management experience is that it really isn’t a spectator sport.

The problem stems from the meetings (and trust me, there will be meetings…… indeed as the project manager you are often in meetings about meetings….. which are OK – it is the meetings about meetings about meetings that you have to watch out for!).

By sounding confident that everything will turn out OK (and no PM really likes to not sound confident because then you look unprofessional – besides – the PM cop out is that its all in the risk log that has been escalated through the agreed channels so no need to keep mentioning any worries).

This external confidence achieves the trick of bringing everyone with you…. because as soon as you start to sound unconfident… your team will start looking for reasons not to do something (rather why it will be great to do something) – which reduces the overall quality of what is being delivered. However, if the marketing team get to hear of this amazing confidence you have in how the release will go they start to get a bit over excited.

This is dangerous

What happens next is that someone in marketing has a great idea to go and tell the world about how amazing the new system will be ahead of when they should do.

A recent example. Ryanair changed their reservation system over the weekend. Apparently it hasn’t gone exactly to plan (although I don’t know what the plan was, obviously). I have had people comment on this blog about Ryanair’s poor website performance since the upgrade…. and there has been some chatter on consumer blogs about it (see Travel-Rants)

Lets have a look at what Ryanair have to say about it in their two statements…..

• 24th Feb 08 - Ryanair reopens ahead of schedule
• 26th Feb 08 - Ryanair update on web system chcangeover

Our new booking site, like our flights, has arrived under budget and ahead of schedule

Ummm…. Under budget? Either this means the budget was massive – or that they ran out of time to spend it all. I assume the schedule they are referring to is going back live one day earlier than in their final plan…. not the schedule of choosing last weekend over any future weekends.

One of the components that tends to come at the end of a project…. and gets squeezed by everyone else running late – is load testing. This is testing to see what happens when you have a certain number of visitors on the website – or making a booking – at any one time. Load testing is expensive – but not that expensive in the grand scheme of things. I wonder if they ran out of time to do it?

Also load testing has to normally be undertaken on the live infrastructure….. especially if your test infrastructure is not the same kit or equipment as your live production system – or it requires connectivity to a 3rd party system. This means that load testing has to be done in a quiet time (overnight)…. and can be tricky to schedule into a project with many last minute releases coming out prior to launch. It would be fully understandable to miss out load testing when cutting corners to get a project to launch on time… Understandable but probably not a wise idea. (Yes – I have dropped load testing sometimes!)

The additional processing power of the new system improves the website speed for customers, especially during peak booking periods

Sounds like new hardware to me

as we complete the largest ever software changeover undertaken by any airline, anywhere in the world

That sounds big then. This maybe the cause of the problems – if their technology supplier (a well known and respected airline system supplier) haven’t done a project this big…. maybe the quantity of data in Ryanair has busted some of the algorithms used to optimise data management internally. A slow fix this one.

The principal difficulty the website is encountering is the enormous surge of passengers a) who were unable to make bookings over the weekend and b) who are keen to get one of Ryanair’s 1 million x 1 penny (tax inclusive) seats, which are available for travel on Tuesdays and Wednesdays in April, May and June.

Ah…. a self inflicted wound created by the marketing team. In my large system projects we try to leave at least 3-4 weeks between system change and any major marketing push…. because this gives you enough time to, without too much pressure, develop (and test) a further release…. and solve any teething problems.

continued to make significant progress on eliminating many of the software glitches involved in bedding down its new ‘New Skies’ reservations system, which is the background booking engine of Ryanair.com

I have seen a lot of press releases about new system changes…. (normally press releases come out when a project goes well….. not badly!)…. anyway, its a bit rare to see an airline name their system in press release about problems. Are they deflecting attention away from themselves?

The irony is that in writing this blog post I am just a spectator….. and travel technology isn’t a spectator sport.

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