I recently found a case study written by Mark Hooper (Project Manager - University of Bedfordshire - Academic Into Business Computing Centre). It’s about my last finished project (Cardguy) and I think Mark really sums up what I have achieved with the project. At the end of the day the ABC prooved to be useful as we had a satisfied client and I received a lot of experience.
News are spreading fast, Ryanair will suspend it’s booking service for 4 (that is four) days! Due to the new Office of Fair Trading rule, airlines are obliged to show their air taxes to customers.
For reasons unknown Ryanair will make these changes (even weeks later then the original deadline) while their booking system is offline. They won’t take any bookings online nor through their phone systems. As pointed out in the the article, they might have just as well place a link on their frontpage to easyJet.com.
Is it just another IT project failure? Might be so. It is clear that Ryanair didn’t plan this well and as Deri Jones (CEO of web application testing specialist SciVisum) says:
Ryanair are not stupid, so there must be some logic to this excessive downtime. It is possible that careful cost management - one of their trademarks - has resulted in under-delivery online, and they are simply paying the price for not having planned and executed better on this change