A Tale of Two Terminals: Beijing Terminal 3 and Heathrow Terminal 5
leanessays.com
leanessays.com
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.
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.
and the other was buill by the chinese
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence
/pedantry
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.
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)
I generally try to avoid Heathrow T3 though (and T2 and T4 never seem to have flights to where I want to go).
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.
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.
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).
The building's nice, though.
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.
A person who has been to a chinese restaurant in china will understand the difference.
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
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