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British Airways passengers facing delays after IT failures

bbc.co.uk

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Re: British Airways passengers facing delays after IT failures

#41

Post by mugsie »

isostatic wrote: post #34
pjc50 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a £2000 fine for passengers with inadequate documentation: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/passenger-documen...

Hwoever every 4-6 passengers they deny boarding is a €2000 fine. For EU flights especially you still check passports at the gate - indeed it's the only place they are checked. For other flights they normally check visas at the checkin desk, but if you're transferring you usually get visa checked at the gate. Most people have nice simple visas that pretty much anyone can check, a few troublemakers like me rely on more…

I believe they still check IDs at the gate, even for internal flights. (I am pretty sure they checked my ID the last time I did one) - It is not an passport check, just an ID check at the gate to match person to ticket (as the security in UK airport just check boarding passes, not IDs)

Re: British Airways passengers facing delays after IT failures

#42

Post by mothsonasloth »

[Controversial post]

This is what happens when you treat "IT" as a cost centre and outsource it to India with TCS, Tech Mahindra, Wipro, Accenture etc. In the case of BA; its Tata Consultancy Service (TCS).

I can't comment on outsourcing to Phillipines, Ukraine or Malaysia.

I've worked with two companies that did their outsourcing to India and it was a shitshow.

First and foremost there is the cultural barrier, sure India is a very Anglicized country but it has so many localised languages (Malalayam, Telugu, Tamil etc.) and cultures that means communication between one IT centre in Bangalore is very different to one in Chennai or Pune. + Compounded with the fact that outsourcing companies distribute the work between IT centres in different regions, it can be hard communicating and organising work.

Secondly, there are brilliant Devs/Testers/Analysts in India but they move around a lot because the pay is so terrible. Therefore a lot of undocumented knowledge gets lost which inevitably causes problems when doing maintenance or solving outages. One week you are working with a brilliant person, the next week they are gone.

Thirdly, the sales people at many outsourcing companies are brilliant. They promise the world, then for the first three months keep the clients happy. Then there is always a slump in service / performance as the "dream team", the sales people use to wow the clients move onto the next company they are trying to woo.

Fourthly, when the offshoring occurs, the transmission of knowledge sharing is very hard. The local people who are being let go won't be too facilitating in this documentation as well which is understandable.

Finally, just the geographical aspect. Teleconferencing, skyping etc. really adds an overhead and slows down productivity.

I'm going to finish with an anecdote, which makes you really appreciate the contrast. I was working on a project, reviewing code submitted by a dev from offshore. This was during monsoon season, a couple of days later I found out the person died in the monsoon due to a severe localised flooding in the place he was living just outside the city. I live in Scotland which is a wet place, but we don't have to worry about drowning or losing our homes to flooding in most cases :(

Re: British Airways passengers facing delays after IT failures

#43

Post by newsgremlin »

trilila wrote: post #19

Seems like software failures are a common occurrence in british banks and airports. Perhaps a culture of corner cutting, and calling it agile, might be the cause?

Legacy software and outsourcing to consultants or contractors. I think that's the story for most organisations in the UK - not willing to invest in having a dedicated team of in-house developers. Meanwhile developers are like nomads and are on the move to the better paid jobs and/or the better tech stack and better workloads. Lot of new graduates coming through but still not enough to meet demands in the market. Training is the biggest cost imo.

Re: British Airways passengers facing delays after IT failures

#44

Post by test001only »

mothsonasloth wrote: post #42

[Controversial post] This is what happens when you treat "IT" as a cost centre and outsource it to India with TCS, Tech Mahindra, Wipro, Accenture etc. In the case of BA; its Tata Consultancy Service (TCS). I can't comment on outsourcing to Phillipines, Ukraine or Malaysia. I've worked with two companies that did their outsourcing to India and it was a shitshow. First and foremost there is the cultural barrier, sure…

I do agree with some of your points but looks like outsourcing industry is the favorite scapegoat these days for any failure. From other anecdotes in this comment section, various other reason are being thrown around for BA repeatedly having IT failure. So without any proper analysis it would be premature to conclude one way or the other.

Re: British Airways passengers facing delays after IT failures

#45

Post by dustinmoris »

mothsonasloth wrote: post #42

[Controversial post] This is what happens when you treat "IT" as a cost centre and outsource it to India with TCS, Tech Mahindra, Wipro, Accenture etc. In the case of BA; its Tata Consultancy Service (TCS). I can't comment on outsourcing to Phillipines, Ukraine or Malaysia. I've worked with two companies that did their outsourcing to India and it was a shitshow. First and foremost there is the cultural barrier, sure…

Minor nitpick, the language is called Malayalam, not "Malalayam". It's easy to remember, because it is the only language in the world which reads the same from back to front ;)

> Therefore a lot of undocumented knowledge gets lost which inevitably causes problems when doing maintenance or solving outages. One week you are working with a brilliant person, the next week they are gone.

I had the same experience with outsourced work to India. Like every place, they have many "rockstar" developers, but these guys do not stay in the same company for too long, an even if they do they don't stay in the same hands-on job for too long and as soon as they move up they will not code anymore themselves, because it is below their pay grade. In India particularly hierarchy plays a huge part in culture and once someone is at a level where coding is seen as "too low" there is nothing you can do to get them continue their job. A company I once worked for even offered a pay rise to their Indian rockstar devs, but wanted them to keep coding and they rather refused the pay rise than doing the "low" work again.

> Thirdly, the sales people at many outsourcing companies are brilliant. They promise the world, then for the first three months keep the clients happy. Then there is always a slump in service / performance as the "dream team", the sales people use to wow the clients move onto the next company they are trying to woo.

Same experience.

I think it's better to hire developers directly and employ them rather than hire developers through a big agency. You won't avoid the staff turnover overall, but it will happen at a much slower frequency.

Re: British Airways passengers facing delays after IT failures

#46

Post by [deleted] »

mothsonasloth wrote: post #42

[Controversial post] This is what happens when you treat "IT" as a cost centre and outsource it to India with TCS, Tech Mahindra, Wipro, Accenture etc. In the case of BA; its Tata Consultancy Service (TCS). I can't comment on outsourcing to Phillipines, Ukraine or Malaysia. I've worked with two companies that did their outsourcing to India and it was a shitshow. First and foremost there is the cultural barrier, sure…

[deleted]

Re: British Airways passengers facing delays after IT failures

#47

Post by raincom »

mothsonasloth wrote: post #42

[Controversial post] This is what happens when you treat "IT" as a cost centre and outsource it to India with TCS, Tech Mahindra, Wipro, Accenture etc. In the case of BA; its Tata Consultancy Service (TCS). I can't comment on outsourcing to Phillipines, Ukraine or Malaysia. I've worked with two companies that did their outsourcing to India and it was a shitshow. First and foremost there is the cultural barrier, sure…

Even though whatever you said is true of offshoring, don't underestimate the incompetence of the in-house talent.

Re: British Airways passengers facing delays after IT failures

#48

Post by itoocode »

mothsonasloth wrote: post #42

[Controversial post] This is what happens when you treat "IT" as a cost centre and outsource it to India with TCS, Tech Mahindra, Wipro, Accenture etc. In the case of BA; its Tata Consultancy Service (TCS). I can't comment on outsourcing to Phillipines, Ukraine or Malaysia. I've worked with two companies that did their outsourcing to India and it was a shitshow. First and foremost there is the cultural barrier, sure…

Agree to lot of your points. Insipite of all these risks, a lot of management teams find value with outsourcing. I guess they feel risks are every where around.

Re: British Airways passengers facing delays after IT failures

#49

Post by kenneth »

I was stuck in LHR during the last time they had an identical system outage. I was lucky to be the very first person in line to check-in when the systems went down, so I was the first through when they fixed it 90min later. I had however missed my flight by then.

Also, everyone was a lot more pleasant about it in the first wing vs. the mess in the general check-in hall.

Seems these issues are not infrequent. BA and LHR need to get their shit together.

Re: British Airways passengers facing delays after IT failures

#50

Post by mgkimsal »

tolien wrote: post #21
beachy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In yesterday's world, yeah. Today, when you have to take off your shoes to get onto a plane in the US, I don't see that happening.

Not even in recent times; since Lockerbie they’ll offload your bags if you’re not on the flight. If BA put aircraft in the air without any idea who was on them, they’d be rapidly forced to land again with the threat of being shot down.

> since Lockerbie they’ll offload your bags if you’re not on the flight.

Not in the US...

Even back in the 90s - just a few years after Lockerbie - we had some UK guests staying with us. We flew from Detroit to Vegas for a few days. They're luggage got put on a different plane, and ended up in LA. They were horrified and couldn't figure out why their luggage was on a flight they weren't on.

Doesn't seem to be a big concern in the US, as I've had my own luggage get on wrong flights at least twice in the past 5 years, and I don't actually fly all that much (2-3 flights a year max).

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