The latest news from Meantime IT

Earlier this year, Heathrow Airport asked us to develop a new system to take its reservist management programme to the next level. Learn more at the link about how we brought our ‘bespoke’ approach and deep knowledge of Heathrow’s systems to bear on this exciting challenge.

In 2011, Heathrow Airport contacted us about writing their 2012 Games volunteering system, with which we managed over 3,500 public volunteers in supporting the Olympics.

At the same time, they also implemented their ‘Reservist’ programme, designed to mobilise non-operational staff to help colleagues during periods of unusual disruption to normal service.

Both systems have been hugely successful the Volunteer programme now runs in its own right to aid passengers 24/7/365, and the Reservist system was used 8 times last year.

At the start of this year, we were contacted about replacing the Reservist system and launching ‘Here to Help’. Here to Help was to work in a similar way, but the focus was to be shifted to make it more operations-based, and the booking process was to be made simpler for users (but with a more complicated algorithm behind the scenes). The system would also introduce ‘continual cover,’ whereby Reservists would choose 3 weeks of the year that they could guarantee to be at the Terminals within 30 minutes of activation, allowing airport coordinators to ensure additional help would be on the way when needed.

In a package software world, this would have been a real problem – a changing requirement that a ‘fixed’ system could no longer accommodate, possibly starting again with a new package or buying a ‘bolt-on’ – assuming it could even be done with software that existed on the market.

But at Meantime, writing our own bespoke systems means that we are always able to help. We quickly identified three phases to the development – the re-engagement process with the Reservist to collect newly required information, the managing of the cover, and then the modification to disruption deployment.

With this phased approach, we were able to deliver phase 1 and 2 in two months, from initial planning to live deployment, with phase 3 entering User Acceptance Testing ready for cover to begin 25th July.

Happily, we too are always ‘Here to Help’.