Failed IT Projects (Part 1): Airbus

I recently came across an article that mentioned the biggest three IT project failures in history, in the opinion of tech site ZDNet.

The point is that even the largest, best organized companies and institutions can find insurmountable hurdles in a software project. And sometimes the root causes are so minor that it's hard to believe they can end up creating such a problem.

We'll go in reverse order... here's #3...

Failed IT Project #3:

Airbus and incompatible design software

When the Airbus A380 megajet project fell two years and $6.1 billion dollars behind schedule, the company admitted that one of the main reasons was the use of incompatible design software.

It seems that Airbus' Toulouse assembly plant used the latest version of their design software, called CATIA, while their design center at Hamburg used an earlier 1980's version. You can imagine how different the two versions are, and that design spec files do not flow easily between them.

Here's a sample of the results of this software problem from Business Week:

"... when pre-assembled bundles containing hundreds of miles of cabin wiring were delivered from a German factory to the assembly line in France, workers discovered that the bundles, called harnesses, didn't fit properly into the plane. Assembly slowed to a near-standstill, as workers tried to pull the bundles apart and re-thread them through the fuselage. Now Airbus will have to go back to the drawing board and redesign the wiring system.

It’s shaping up to be one of the costliest blunders in the history of commercial aerospace."

Of course, the 525-seat, double-decker, environmentally friendly A380 has since launched very successfully.

(Also, Airbus has one of the best websites I've seen in a long time.)

Related articles:

• Failed IT Project #3: Airbus and incompatible design software
• Failed IT Project #2: The UK National Health Service national e-health project

Tags: Airbus, IT projects

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