Software projects are created every day. Every company or even a single person wants to have a better process. They want to do things faster and wish their computers or smartphones would make their jobs easier. The demand can’t stop growing and this is what the market wants. As soon as the request is created, the team responsible for the development has to deal with the client and be able to help the client to achieve his goal. The dream would be to have good software, within the budget and in two days from now. Real life is far from that. Kogekar (2013) suggests that less than fifty per cent of IT projects finish on time and on budget. In order to get softwares done, project managers have to deal with a lot of factors and be able to predict key factors that can kill a project in a matter of time. These critical components are those who make the way of the project, successful or not. The pursuit of a good software can go well and lead to a good software or go wrong and throw into millions of dollars in the trash. This study will look into The Denver Airport Baggage Handling System and use it as an example of how wrong decisions and weak planning can prejudice not only a project but the whole institution.

1.
DENVER AIRPORT BAGGAGE HANDLING SYSTEM 1
Denver Airport Baggage Handling System
The State of the Art System that Was Never Finished
Gabriel Augusto Gomes
University of Colorado Colorado Springs

2.
DENVER AIRPORT BAGGAGE HANDLING SYSTEM 2
ABSTRACT
Software projects are created every day. Every company or even a single person wants to have a
better process. They want to do things faster and wish their computers or smartphones would
make their jobs easier. The demand can’t stop growing and this is what the market wants. As
soon as the request is created, the team responsible for the development has to deal with the
client and be able to help the client to achieve his goal. The dream would be to have good
software, within the budget and in two days from now. Real life is far from that. Kogekar (2013)
suggests that ​less than fifty per cent of IT projects finish on time and on budget.
In order to get softwares done, project managers have to deal with a lot of factors and be able to
predict key factors that can kill a project in a matter of time. These critical components are those
who make the way of the project, successful or not. The pursuit of a good software can go well
and lead to a good software or go wrong and throw into millions of dollars in the trash.
This study will look into The Denver Airport Baggage Handling System and use it as an example
of how wrong decisions and weak planning can prejudice not only a project but the whole
institution.
Keywords: project­fail, denver­airport, project­management

3.
DENVER AIRPORT BAGGAGE HANDLING SYSTEM 3
The problem
Look at every airport around the world and the problem is the same: rush time, everybody is in a
hurry because of a transfer and lines waiting for bags. Discovered the baggage track, no less than
fifteen minutes when the step finally start to move. Unfortunately it is normal in most of the
airports because normally the luggage was manually handled from the aircraft.
Even though they say your baggage is handled, we know that it is not gingerly. Normally bags
are hurled from side to side, making the service much faster and easier even if you have the
“Fragile” sticker. When you have your bag back to your hands in the same shape it was before
your flight, you are lucky. The damage factor has to be considered, always.
Handle luggage all day is not an easy job. There are four main reasons for luggage get lost: when
the routing label gets damaged, when the owner forget to pick up his luggage upon landing, the
wrong destination code typed and when your bag is loaded in the wrong plane (Mulvihill, 2011).
A “simply” automatic system would avoid these problems.
The idea
Many airports have tried to fix the baggage problem but the City of Denver wanted to build a
huge system that was in charge of the full handling of baggage between the three concourses.
The idea was to get rid of the workforce and offer a faster service to the traveler. The system
would be fully independent and it would theoretically solve the biggest headache of airport
managers among the world (Coolman, 2014).
The system would save thirty minutes in every flight, which represents less time for the traveler
and the dream for the airport. With less time per flight, the airport would receive more flights

4.
DENVER AIRPORT BAGGAGE HANDLING SYSTEM 4
without rush. These are some of the astronomical numbers involving the DIA system: 88 airport
gates in 3 concourses, 17 miles of track and 5 miles of conveyor belts, 3100 standard carts + 450
oversized carts, 14 million feet of wiring, network with more than 100 PC’s to control flow of
carts, 5000 electric motors, 2700 photo cells, 400 radio receivers and 59 laser arrays (Calleam,
2008).
The Application of the Project
The system was supposed to be the core of the airport, it was called the “Integrated Automated
Baggage Handling System”. There were system far like this, the San Francisco and Munich
system. These two, being less compact and painless took two years to implement. German
consultants warned that even with the two years to build their system, they had to run the
operations twenty four hours a day, every single day of the week in the last six months of the
work. This all had to be done just to be close to purging the errors of the system (Calleam, 2008).
The construction of the airport started in 1989 and the first thought of the airport managers
would be that each airline would take care of their own system (or manually handling), the way
they wanted to do. It was a comfortable position but fall of 1991 and the bids for the system were
just about to come and surprise the managers. Sixteen companies were included in an auction to
create an integrated system. Only three responded but they concluded that none could deliver the
system at time for the big opening, two years from the bidding process. Time was running out of
the clock and the construction could not stop. They knew they needed a system to handle the
baggage and the project management team was not willing to give up.

5.
DENVER AIRPORT BAGGAGE HANDLING SYSTEM 5
Early 1992 and the Denver Airport contracts BAE(Boeing Airport Equipment Automated
Systems Incorporated), a world leader in the baggage handling market, to expand their first
contract. The first contract was supposed to build a similar system but only for the Concourse A.
The initial project was expanded to the whole airport and the DIA(Denver International Airport)
had their contract signed (Calleam, 2008). The United Airlines system now had to work for all
airlines, all concourses and to all flights, departing and arriving. Pretty good challenge.
The City of Denver was going through a project that was supposed to fail. After the Breier
Neidle Patrone Associates said the project was too complex and the specialist from Munich
warned about the short timeline, they were still proceeding. According to BAE managers, the
project would need to have at a least four years of duration (Coolman, 2014).
The Critical Points
It was notorious that this project was destined to disaster. The critical points to be observed are
numerous but some key points and decisions made are helpful to make us better understand the
decision making process of project managers. It is important to have in mind that a project of this
size requires experts and people with the best backgrounds possible but when we talk about a
project like this, we can’t forget about the stakeholders. Looking into the details and the serious
aspects, the DIA Baggage Handling System shows that the mistakes committed a couple years
ago still happen nowadays.

6.
DENVER AIRPORT BAGGAGE HANDLING SYSTEM 6
Persist After Several Warnings
Experts were against the project; sixteen companies could not qualifify to do the job; smaller
similar projects took more time. It was more than enough reasons to change the strategy but the
DIA persisted.
Unfortunately we can see this characteristics in projects from different sizes. Somebody wanted
more money, they wanted the job. For those responsibles of the project, the DIA Airport has to
be a model and they would not accept anything different from that.
Concentrated Decisions
The decisions in a project have different process to be made. They have requirements and each
one has a different path to lead into something different from what was planned before. DIA’s
Chief Engineer, Walter Slinger was a Civil Engineer and the one responsible for the project. He
made the deal with BAE after the first three companies do not qualify for the job.
The project planning was concentrated with the DIA and BAE’s team but what about the
airlines? The airlines are the milestones of this project and they would be the benefited or
harmed by the system. Surprisingly they were not involved in the decision making process.
When they were consulted, as expected, changes were requested and the design team had to deal
with it. It was not only simple changes but ski equipment racks, special treatment with oversized
luggage and other maintenance adjustments. The team had to remake parts of the project because
these were mandatory changes (Calleam, 2008).
The project manager has to be aware of changes and involve specific people according to the
system he is managing.

7.
DENVER AIRPORT BAGGAGE HANDLING SYSTEM 7
Accepting Changes and Communication Problem
In a system like this, changes would happen. Not to mention the lack of organization in the
beginning. In a project of this size with so many changes, communication would certainly be a
problem. The changes requested by the airlines were major in there were people in the team who
saw this, the impact of the changes in the system but these were not those who made the
decisions.
Conclusion
The project was fated to fail. The key errors just contributed to that. In the middle of the process,
the managers had to face the death of the principal project manager, Walter Slinger. He is know
to be a leader that like to do things on his own, without previous advice and this characteristic
may be one more to of the ones that led the project to the rock bottom.
According to Coolman(2014), “the project went 16 months past its hard deadline, cost the city
$560 million over budget, and performed just a fraction of its original automation goals. Instead
of integrating the three concourses and all airlines, it was only used at one concourse, for one
airline, for outbound flights only. The project team had to resort to building a second, manual
labor system for all other baggage operations. And after valiantly attempting to use the system
for 10 years, the only airline that actually adopted the system finally bowed out due to high
maintenance costs.”

8.
DENVER AIRPORT BAGGAGE HANDLING SYSTEM 8
References
Kogekar, H. (2013, December 5). Why IT projects really fail. Retrieved February 5, 2015, from
http://www.cio.com.au/article/533532/why_it_projects_really_fail/
Coolman, A. (2014, October 30). Lessons Learned from Project Failure at Denver International
Airport: Why Checking Bags is Still a Pain ­ Wrike Blog. Retrieved February 5, 2015, from
https://www.wrike.com/blog/lessons­learned­from­project­failure­at­denver­international­airport
­why­checking­bags­is­still­a­pain/
Johnson, K. (2005, August 26). Denver Airport Saw the Future. It Didn't Work. Retrieved
February 5, 2015, from
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/27/national/27denver.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Mulvihill, K. (2011, August 26). 4 most common reasons airlines lose luggage ­ CNN.com.
Retrieved February 5, 2015, from
http://www.cnn.com/2011/08/26/travel/why­airlines­lose­luggage­bt/
Calleam Consulting (2008). Case Study – Denver International Airport Baggage Handling
System – An illustration of ineffectual decision making. Retrieved February 5, 2015, from
http://calleam.com/WTPF/wp­content/uploads/articles/DIABaggage.pdf