Case studies by Meantime IT

Keen to improve its ability to handle situations such as extreme weather but also to improve the airport’s operation during periods of intense activity – such as Christmas – the airport launched a Winter Resilience Review to look at its handling of such scenarios and how they might be improved to offer a better experience to Heathrow’s customers.

When the Winter Resilience review delivered its findings, one key requirement was a better method of tracking the non-operational staff that was redeployed at times of intense activity. The incident management team not only needed to be able to manage where these “Reservists” were deployed but also to be able to communicate with them more effectively.

Meantime IT was invited to tender for this work on the basis of the successful implementation of the booking system that the company built for BAA to manage appointments at their ID Centres. Fenner Pearson, the MD at Meantime was involved in the tender process: “What was clear to me quite early on was that this wasn’t a simple booking system. There were many factors to be taken into account, such as the Reservists different skill sets, the languages they spoke and the terminals with which they were familiar. These needed to be married with the differing requirements for roles at different locations around the airport”.

Meantime was successful in securing the project and spent several weeks analysing the requirements and preparing for development. Steve Parker is the lead developer: “Of course, it’s one thing for us to build a database and management system for Reservists but I had to bear in mind that for all the system’s complexity, the user interface had to be very simple. People use it in a hurry and under pressure and don’t want to be exposed to any complexity”.

The build and implementation went according to plan and the system has already been used three times in the few weeks since it went live. It has been described by a member of Heathrow’s Executive as “the most innovative software solution to a problem that I’ve ever seen”.

The system has managed the deployment of nine hundred Reservists for each of the events, communicating with them regularly whilst providing real time reporting to the incident management team. Crucially, the feedback from the Reservists themselves has been very positive, describing the system as simple to use.

Fenner Pearson: “I’m really delighted with how the project has gone. It was a big responsibility but it provided us with an opportunity to display many of our core strengths around both system and interface design. It’s unusual for us to receive feedback from such a large group of users and the fact it’s been universally positive has been very, very gratifying