Sabre Holdings Corp. embarked on a $100-million-plus project to rebuild their air-travel reservation system. The old system was designed when assembly code was the rage; the system was 10 million lines of code. The new system was designed for C++ and Java, using servers and databases that were not even possible when the original system was built. That means the new system was a complete redo. And they brought the system in on time and on budget. How did they do it?
It was no small feat this time around. In 1988, Sabre managers tried to overhaul the system and spent $125 million. The project was well planned and broken into manageable pieces to be built in parallel, as was the prevailing project management advice at the time. After 3 ½ years of development, it didn’t work. Partners like Budget Rent a Car and Hilton and Marriott hotel chains were scheduled to use it. But a few weeks before the due date, the entire project was scrapped.
But this time, managers took a different approach similar to agile programming for this project. First they did the project as a series of small steps, each providing functionality that can be tweaked or redesigned as necessary. Small steps make it possible to change direction or even respond to changes in technology without disrupting the entire project. For example, functions originally targeted for one type of server were rearchiteeted for a different server. In addition, Linux servers, which did not look viable when the project began, could be used later when they were proven to be appropriate for this environment. Second, the small steps make it possible to go live with each iteration of the system before beginning the next stop. This ensures that the system works and meets the users’ needs.
Observers noted, “That doesn’t sound like a lug IT project. Everything we expect from a big IT project is missing: The grand, detailed plan; the divide-at-the-start-and-integrate-at-the-end strategy; the years-before-it-goes-live schedule. That approach has doomed big IT projects for generations. IT had too much change, and depending on too much perfection in execution.”
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