Process chaos at London Heathrow

Having had the misfortune to pass through London Heathrow airport twice in the last few weeks I can personally vouch for the chaotic, careless, rude and unprofessional way in which that airport is processing its customers since the latest round of safety threats regarding UK to US flights and the threat of liquid explosives.

I fully acknowledge the (unfortunate) need for enhanced security measures and the added stress this entails for all parties in the international travel supply chain - however, the operations and behaviour I witnessed and experienced by the Heathrow systems and people was dismaying and disgraceful.

I traveled through LHR almost 3 weeks, and then again 4 weeks, after the security alert regarding liquid explosives occurred and I naively thought that they would have had their act together and systems and processes in place to be able to efficiently handle the congestion that the enhanced security measures would cause. I was sadly, badly and madly wrong - this place is a disaster. I am writing this 10 days later and it still makes me angry.

Let's just quickly summarise those additional security measures (which weirdly enough were rather inconsistently applied):

• reduced size hand luggage (a wooden board was attached to the top of the steel "does your hand baggage fit in here" frame - basically halving the width of the acceptable bag. Interestingly if your bag had soft sides and malleable contents and you could literally wrestle it through the slot that was OK! And business/first class was not restricted - I don't think terrorists intent on personal annihilation would be concerned about the price of the ticket they bought but obviously not a concern for LHR.
• no liquids or pastes of any sort allowed in hand luggage - very distressing for a lot of women who had to abandon their perfume and cosmetics
• all pocket contents, belts and footwear to be scanned at the security checkpoints into the departure areas
• thankfully they had relaxed the "no notebooks, cameras, mobile phones etc" policy as apparently a huge volume of these had been stolen during the period this was applied and I didn't want to join that statistic (says a lot about the security vetting in the HR recruitment process and exit controls for employees when thousands of expensive, portable items can be willfully stolen so easily).

OK - fair enough - restrictions were called for - although the smaller hand baggage allowance was certainly very inconsistently applied as I looked at people going through ahead of me all booking into similar flights and destinations - however I digress.

The nightmare started at dawn when arriving at Terminal 4 and transferring to Terminal 1 for a connecting flight. The human congestion was so bad that even the transfer buses were backing up, unable to disgorge their tired and grumpy passengers due to the queues ahead in the processing area. And this is where the shocking process and behaviour occurred.

Imagine a queue of many hundreds if not thousands, of passengers pouring in from all destinations and connecting on to many more being funneled into a single queue for security processing at the very front - idiocy. I got to the top of the queue to be told that my hand luggage, that had been acceptable out of Australia, was now too big for the new regime, so I had to join a different queue to check it in to the hold for my connecting flight. That's OK, I am happy to do that, but why have me wait in a line for 45 minutes to get that instruction? A sign and a size tester at the start of the queue would have had me processed and out of the way in seconds. Madness. And it was the same for fluids and pastes, only when you got to the top of the queue were you told there was another queue for those (and a tiny table on which to dump your offending liquids absolutely groaning under the pile of discarded items - this was not day one of the change - where was the big dumper bin?).

Throughout this nightmare a couple of uniformed comptrollers paraded up and down rebuffing all pleads for assistance in meeting tight connecting flight times - I literally heard an official snarl to an elderly woman in tears "that is your place in the queue now stay there" - disgraceful. (At another potential "flash point" area the supposed crowd management official was sitting behind a desk reading a novel whilst queue jumpers barged the doors and elderly couples started to faint).

So - that is my rant - but could I have done better? I don't know, I don't work in the business, I don't understand the constraints of the location, staffing, job demarcation, emergency legislation etc and haven't been exposed to their disaster/emergency planning and change management challenges. However, call me old fashioned, call me a fool, some simple "streaming" via large (and cheap) signage and cheery folk guiding and advising at the start of the queue would have been a massive productivity improvement in my opinion.

"If your bag doesn't fit in the size-slot go right - If you have fluids and pastes go left - If you have connecting flights within X mins from now join that queue - Everyone else join this queue". Not rocket science, not expensive, not hard, not training intensive.

How about having announcements in the buses on the way to the terminals - "you will soon be arriving at Terminal 1 and the security procedures are as follows ...... Please note that these will strictly be enforced and we advise you to pay attention to the signs and officials as you get off the bus" - hey, have it in a couple of languages too.

The Heathrow passenger processing methods were disgraceful, their communication was shocking, their people training would appear to have been appalling and there was no sign of improvement a week later when I did it all again so there was no intention of improvement. Very sad and a lesson in "how not to" for all of us interested in process.

Continuing the BPM journey - is it a map or a script?

So here you now sit with a finely honed process model in your hot and sticky hands. What do you do now? Well the first question to ask yourself is probably - is this a map of how to get somewhere or a script of how to do something? How you answer this will radically direct your next steps.

A map is the easy one - this process flow records the path that is taken to get from one point to another in the business continuum. It is something to be referred to if you lose your way or are starting on the journey and want to understand what the destination is. In effect this is a reference document and can be managed appropriately - published on the Intranet? Or bound into a handsome manual? How about laminating it and sticking it on the wall? (I know one company that was driven to dementia by the abuse of the kitchen facilities and the mess they were always being left in. So an impressive, colourful and explicit process map was drawn up that clearly identified the role of the dishwasher and the wiping cloth to those who were in doubt. Laminated of course for easy cleaning!). By the way, remember to keep it up to date as the landscape changes as there is nothing more frustrating to the intrepid traveler than an out-of-date map (this issue of currency is invariably a painful and tedious process and something I will be coming back to in due course).

The script is the harder answer to deliver against - for this means the process is to become procedural law, every time we perform this process, no matter by whom, these are the rules and regulations that are to be followed. This of course is the great challenge - how do you get everyone in the organisation to follow these laws? How do you communicate them? How do you implement them? How to you entice, enforce and police them? How do you handle the crises of non-compliance? This is the area where technology and the automation of business processes comes into their own - the land of the Business Process Management System/Suite.

But beware, before you launch off on the next great technology hunt, spare a thought for the herd of white elephants that may already be cluttering up your cupboards, there is little room in there for another, choose wisely and choose well!