Litigation support involves more these days than a bit of law and some rules. You need an interest in functional design and in process and workflow. It is also a business where time and resources matter, and where much effort is devoted to working out how to apply the fewest people for the shortest time needed to achieve the client’s objective.

I seem to spend quite a lot of my time travelling these days (I am in Dallas as I write this), and I wonder why the same interests do not have a place at airports. Take the check-in, the first section you come in the long haul through to your seat. It is a place where impenetrable static obstacles – a series of queues – form north-south to your entrance, whilst large numbers of people need to move east-west and west-east laden with baggage, whilst others stand around waiting for….something – the end of the world sometimes seems both more imminent and more desirable.

The design imperative, you would think, is to allow as much space as possible between the door and the check-in desks. What you find almost everywhere on the vast estates which airports have is a narrow, cramped foyer in which queues, baggage-carriers and waiters get under each others’ feet.

Of course, it would be even better if someone in authority applied themselves to improving the process so that the queues do not form in the first place. Still, if my experience at Heathrow’s T5 last week is anything to go by, the staff have been well-drilled in the smiling helpfulness of damage-limitation which, at airports as at software support desks, goes a long way towards defusing the potential for punch-ups.

They obviously have process very much in mind at American Airlines, on which I flew yesterday from LA to Dallas. A rigorously-imposed batch system meant that we were sent through to Cattle Class in groups which matched our row numbers. All Group A had to go through before Group B could start, and so on. I was in the last group which gave me a grand-stand view of the consequences of a plan which had more rigour than logic to it.

I can’t remember what sort of plane it was, but it had a long, narrow aisle with no potential for passing others without the sort of squeeze which lands you on some kind of register these days. The grouping system, I had assumed, would fill from the back, the furthest end from the door. Not a bit of it. The first ones through were for the front-most seats, then the middle and then the back. Those of us with rear seats had to wait whilst those sent in before us found their seats, stowed their baggage, remembered something in their bags and got them down again and all the usual frigging around which is part and parcel of getting on a plane.

Anguished pleas came from the cockpit about the imminent risk of losing our take-off slot, but in truth there was nothing the passengers could do.

This must happen every day, several times a day. The best form of metrics-gathering, I always think, is the old-fashioned time-and-motion man with a clip-board and a stop-watch. I would not take him long to solve the blockage with a simple reversal of the present practice. The plane was fine, the crew great and LAX is by no means the worst airport I have been through recently. It was not the technology, the technicians or the infrastructure which screwed up the process but the project management.

There are plenty of potential equivalents in discovery / disclosure exercises. The difference between a good project-manager and a not so good one is often more significant than the choice of technology, technical people and infrastructure.

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