Today the Queen is to open Heathrow Terminal 5. It seems strange that Terminal 5 is finally opening. I worked for BAA for a large chunk of 2003 when everyone talked about the very distant go live in March 2008. My project was incrementally delivered during 2003, so my stuff went into service a long time ago; but finally 2008 is here!
Divert two rivers, extend the Piccadilly line, extend the Heathrow Express, 5 floors each the size of ten football pitches etc. I found it interesting how various construction exercises were rehearsed elsewhere because when you are spending £4.3bn you really don't need a delay with so many interdependencies - that is millions every day being impacted. Then there were all the other subtle constraints; like doing Europe's largest ever construction program inside the busiest international airport. For a start that means you have a radar ceiling - don't go putting up high cranes and confusing some critical systems! Find a different way.
Whilst on the project, with my excellent panoramic view of the airport, I watched the final Concorde flights come in. The evening flights to New York used to remind me that it was time to head off home!
So, today, I am having a personal little high seeing this achievement climax. I'll bet there are loads of people out there who contributed their myriad skills in many ways and celebrating too. Well done whoever you are and whatever you did.
What did I do? In retrospect, it was a form of Master Data Management for all the assets that go into making Terminal 5, from the HVAC to door furniture. It was all built using SQL Server, ASP .Net and Crystal Reports. Like T5 itself we applied some very rigorous quality to our solution from a very detailed NAnt build including FxCop, NUnit, NDoc, NCover, (NMock was too immature) and XCopy deploy/undeploy - I never even met the operations team that took our documentation and deployment assets - we just handed it over and it worked! We were an agile 2 pizza team with the primary stakeholder sitting at the same desks seeing the solution from the continuous builds. Wasn't much call for Sprint reviews!