The media has portrayed the 200 remaining bugs in systems at the
New En Route Centre at Swanwick, Hampshire, in a negative light.
Actually it may be the best news to emerge about the Swanwick
project for six years, says Tony Collins
There seems to be an end in sight to the ongoing systems
problems at the new air traffic control centre being built at
Swanwick near Southampton. For senior management at National Air
Traffic Services, the question seems now to be one of when, rather
than if, it can manage to dispatch all of the bugs in the
system.
National Air Traffic Services now aims to finish the main part
of the IT project by 20 December when its IT staff are due to hand
over the systems to operational management. December is also the
deadline for a fully working system to gain interim approval from
the Safety Regulation Group of the Civil Aviation Authority. In
effect this approval will confirm the system's viability.
That 200 bugs currently remain in the system only a few months
from the December target date has indicated to the some parts of
the media that the project is doomed. But the number has halved
since May this year.
For the first time, the figure is down to a manageable size.
Only a short time ago, it appeared to be too high to tackle in the
time available. But the board of National Air Traffic Services has
decided that the organisation has sufficient staff and skills to
eliminate most, if not all, of the 200 bugs in time.
More importantly the discussions are no longer focused on
whether the system goes live: only when. Two years ago, it appeared
to Computer Weekly, some MPs and IT specialists that the
project was displaying the hallmarks of a major public sector IT
disaster.
Now National Air Traffic Services management is no longer
secretive and defensive about the risks and problems on the
project. This openness could signal that senior management is
genuinely confident of success.
In his first in-depth interview on the state of the project,
Colin Chisholm, deputy chief executive of the service, explains
that National Air Traffic Services is embarking on a series of
roadshows at air traffic control centres around the UK to answer
questions raised by staff.
One of the aims is to talk to staff and answer questions about
the Swanwick project and other matters such as the public/private
partnership under which 51% of National Air Traffic Services is due
to be sold to the private sector and to employees.
"In the last two years we have worked very hard at being open
with our staff and about programme, the risks in the project, and
setting realistic goals which we weren't doing before quite
frankly. I really don't have anything to hide," Chisholm
explains.
"We are saying: here is our programme and we stand behind it. We
are not trying to oversell it or come across with bluff and
bluster. We have had two sizeable meetings with staff at the London
Air Traffic Control Centre and we're following it up with
roadshows," he adds.
"Most of the questioning [so far] has been about Swanwick. So
what did we say?
"We have been making pretty good progress. It has not been
without the odd difficulty. But we have not had anything yet that
has been a showstopper. There have been problems that have been
pretty tricky but we have managed our way through those. The
programme is running pretty well to date.
"We slipped a bit on only one of the key sub-milestones. But we
have managed to get through the air traffic control simulations to
prove that controllers can work with this system and that the
procedures work.
"We have reached the point now that we're sufficiently confident
to say yes we are convinced we have a good programme to technical
handover," Chisholm adds.
Technical handover involves the IT staff transfering the systems
to operational management. After technical handover the main IT
effort will focus on the operational target date, known as O date,
of 27 January 2002.
"The programme to O date is mostly concerned with a very
elaborate programme of 11 months of training of air traffic
controllers." This begins at the end of January 2001.
Frank Agnew, IT director of National Air Traffic Services, says
the scheduling of the controllers' training presents a managerial
challenge since it will take place on the systems at Swanwick,
while they are being tested and undergo enhancements - and during
the "bust summer months" next year.
"It is a big and complex [training] programme which has got to
be planned to the nth degree," Agnew says. "Any controller, whether
they are sick, unavailable or whatever must go through the training
programme and get the validation [on the systems]."
Chisholm adds, "We are going through tremendously elaborate
testing of all the system components. A lot of it, for example, has
been testing of links between London Air Traffic Control Centre and
Swanwick."
Next year there will be two major software upgrades. "We are
mapping this out," he says. "We are moving from three to four
[major upgrades] a year to two a year. The two we have got to do
during 2001 are a mix of further change that we have identified as
necessary - essential change, some of which is related to the needs
of air traffic controllers - and some of it is engineering
related."
One of the key changes involves improving the warning messages
that flash on the air traffic controllers' screens when an aircraft
moves out of their area of control and responsibility. The aim is
for a warning to flash on the display to remind the controllers to
ensure that they have completed all their co-ordination checks
before an aircraft leaves their screen and becomes the
responsibility of others.
"There is a quirk over whether it flashes or not," says
Chisholm. "We want it to work in 100% of cases".
It is important to fix this problem because the Swanwick system,
unlike the current manual process, supports the automated transfer
of aircraft from one air space sector to another.
Currently at the London Air Traffic Control Centre, when
controllers relinquish responsibility for an aircraft, they confirm
this by phoning the appropriate new controller. This will not
happen under the new automated procedures at Swanwick.
"We are open with people about the risks," says Chisholm, "This
project has a high degree of visibility with all our managers. We
have been briefing the board. We track all the risks. I think the
combined effect of the risks [of not achieving the January 2002
target date] is in the medium-low category.
"It has been higher than that certainly on the way through here.
It's not without risk. It's not no risk, or absolutely minimal.
It's medium low. There are some difficult things still to achieve,
both to get to technical handover and to O date and we don't hide
that from anybody".
On the remaining bugs in the system, called programme trouble
reports (PTRs), Chisholm says that in the past "the number of PTRs
we had to fix looked very formidable. It really was a problem to
us".
PTRs are divided into five categories:
- Categories 1-3 are regarded as essential, for which a fix must
be made at some time in the future;
- Category 4 is non-essential; and
- Category 5 relates to documentation.
National Air Traffic Services has been categorising the grade
1-3 faults by whether a fix has been identified and whether it is
crucial to fix it by technical handover, or by O date.
"At one point we were looking at over 1,000 PTRs that had to be
fixed by technical handover and we were running with a backlog of
category 1-3s.
During May and June Chisholm explains, "We really focused on
this and the [upgrades to] systems have gone better. Build 1.35 [an
earlier major software upgrade] was an extremely good build with a
low number of faults in it. Prior to that we were getting a fair
number of faults in each build as well as trying to fix the
backlog.
Breaking down the backlog
"In the past we weren't catching up as much as we wanted to," he
adds. "Now we are making real inroads into the backlog. Build 1.36
has continued in same vein: a really good delivery of software and
a relatively low number of faults in it.
"We have just taken delivery of Build 1.37 and it is looking
good as well. That tells me that the programmers are getting to
grips with the system. They are understanding it and their ability
to fix the faults is getting better.
Chisholm says, "What we have seen now for the first time is that
the number we have got to fix is within bounds of being fixed
[before technical handover]. Our outlook to technical handover is
that we can pull these PTRs down to zero or close to zero.
"We could have taken a judgement that we would run with a number
of PTRs that we knew would not bring the system down and we would
tell our controllers or our engineers: you will see this fault from
time to time, and this is the procedure to get around that. You
really do not want too much of that."
He says no system is bug free, even the Flight Data Processing
System at London Air Traffic Control Centre, the software for which
has been largely rewritten over the past 20 years.
"At one time we had a target that we would not go to technical
handover with more than 400 category 1-3 or severity 1-3. Now we
are going to be way below that. We are going to be quite close to
zero now, in the tens and twenties."
Chisholm says he is "feeling fairly good about it" but is not
complacent. Fixing any one of the bugs could prove a "sticky
job".
Agnew says the focus now is on continuing to bring down the
number of PTRs and the changes to the systems. This is echoed by
Chisholm: "There has been a good and vigorous debate between the
customer, the project team and Lockheed Martin to agree [what
changes are essential]. They have reduced the amount of change that
they require partly by smart analysis: for example, do we really
need to change all those things; maybe we could do without that and
that.
"Also the programmers see a cleverer way to do that now, so that
the software doesn't need 5,000 lines of code to be written. We
could do it in 500. There has been quite a lot of that.
"The change exercise is complete. We just have to deliver it.
But we are confident we can do that."
If the worst came to the worst, and the systems in January 2002
were not wholly satisfactory could National Air Traffic Services go
live in stages?
Chisholm says, "Potentially yes but I think in practice we would
not. You could go live with certain sectors. We have looked at it
in the past and it is fairly complicated thing to do but
theoretically you could do it".
And how will National Air Traffic Services cope with the problem
of new systems causing a productivity dip when they go live?
"There will be no compromise on safety," says Chisholm. "That
cannot be compromised and will not be compromised. What does happen
though is that, in terms of the service, it could affect our
ability to move all the airlines without delay. We are already
advising the airlines that around the time of the transition we
will put on quite restricted flow rates [of aircraft coming in and
out of UK air space].
"We will not attempt to run at our normal level while we are
doing this transition and the airlines expect that. We choose the
dead of winter to go live. We would not attempt it in the middle of
the summer because the service hit would be too severe. We hope
that in the middle of winter we will limit the service but we hope
it will not be too damaging to the airlines," he adds.
There may also be delays next summer as controllers are taken
off their normal duties at London Air Traffic Control Centre to
train on the Swanwick system.
Chisholm says, "We have enough controllers but once you take
sizeable numbers out of the operation you reduce its resilience. So
if you get a little bit of sickness or very pronounced flows of
traffic through certain sectors, typically at a weekend, and you
cannot deploy extra controllers onto that area, you might take some
service hit.
"Controllers have a feeling we are tight on numbers. We
certainly have enough to get us through transition, and there are
enough to get into operation. Success rates on new controllers not
as good as I was hoping so I have tightened up assumptions. We are
not in a fool's paradise. It's tight, depending on what sort of
service you want delivered. The number we will have in the first
summer is comparable to the service that we have delivered in the
previous two summers."
Timetable for next 18 months
- August 2000: work continues on eliminating 200 bugs in
systems
- December 2000: technical handover. A fully working system is
due to be handed over by IT staff to operations
executives
- December 2000: Civil Aviation Authority's Safety Regulation
Group due to given interim approval to a fully working
system
- January 2001: final bids due on 46% sale of National Air
Traffic Services (Nats)
- February 2001: controllers begin phased 11-month training on
the new system
- March 2001: partial sale of Nats to be completed
- January 2002: system to become operational
Remaining project challenges
- Greatly reduce or eradicate the 200 existing bugs before 20
December 2000
- Also by 20 December, buy and install into the complex
infrastructure an uninterruptible power supply system to help
support 200 controller workstations
- Train air traffic controllers on the new operational systems
next year - at a time when two new major releases of software are
being installed and tested
- Update communications protocols to make systems compatible with
those at control centres in Europe
- Train as many controllers on the new systems next year, while
taking out a minimum number of controllers from operational
duties
- Maintain top-level commitment and attention to the project at a
time when directors are involved in negotiations to sell 46% of the
organisation to the private sector
- Maintain an internal and external openness and lack of
defensiveness even if problems begin to mount
- Ensure that the new scheduled releases of software have a
minimal number of bugs. Part of the job of the new releases is to
cure earlier bugs
- Maintain staff morale at a time of uncertainty over the
public/private partnership sell-off
Positive steps being taken
- Problem resolution by up to 300 experienced IT staff and
managers based at Swanwick
- Financial commitment ensures that National Air Traffic Services
can afford any major purchases that are necessary to resolve any
serious problems that may arise
- Tough decisions are taken to minimise changes and defer any
modifications that can safely be left until later
- Roadshows at traffic control centres in the UK to answer
questions raised by staff