Hard lessons from soft projects

The paper is about the National Air Traffic Services´ (NATS) New En Route Centre project-an Air Traffic Control Centre being built at Swanwick in Hampshire (UK). The air traffic control world has many examples of systems that significantly overshot their budgets and timescales, some were abandoned. The current Swanwick project management team thought this project would be different. It was believed the methods and experience applied would avoid the mistakes others had made. For five years the “evidence” showed that we were making good progress. Then the programme stalled. It has subsequently been the subject of discussion in the press and has recently been audited at the request of the Government. The paper explains the project, how it started, what happened and where it is now. In particular there are some “soft” issues that seem important and it is the author´s hope that the reader will at least find them interesting