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Computerworld - By nearly all measures, a $5.4 billion construction project at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport has been a success. The centerpiece of the effort, which began in 1999, was the addition of a new runway at the nations busiest airport, which logged just under 1 million flights last year. The project also included the addition of new gates and a rental car facility.

The new runway was completed in May 2006, 11 days ahead of schedule and $100 million under budget  an impressive achievement for a construction project of such magnitude. But what makes the accomplishment even more notable is that the project was executed while responsibility for the underlying IT support activities was being handed off from an external group of IT contractors to a city-run agency  one whose IT organization was undergoing profound cultural change.

When Lance Lyttle stepped in as the CIO for the city of Atlantas Department of Aviation in 1999, the group had an IT staff of just six. Most of the IT activities were handled by supplemental workers, including 20-plus contractors who supported functions from technical support to Y2k preparations.

After Y2k, Lyttle began developing an IT master plan to support the airports strategic plan. He decided it would make more sense to use permanent employees for work such as network and database administration, so he started building the groups staff by offering jobs to some of the top contractors. Our salaries were not as competitive at the time as a private-sector entity, says Lyttle. Still, he managed to lure about five contractors into the fold.

Over the next three years, Lyttle added staffers, and the hybrid permanent/contract staff made progress. Since the airport lacked a high-speed data network, the first area Lyttle focused on was network management and IT infrastructure. In 2001, the agency built its first data center at the airport. It houses the telecommunications infrastructure equipment and servers that support applications throughout the airport. In 2003, the fiber backbone for all 5.8 million square feet of the airport was completed.

But another challenge was brewing. Just prior to Lyttles arrival, the city of Atlanta had tapped a small group of IT consultants as a program team to handle the airport construction projects IT requirements while the Department of Aviations IT staff grew and stabilized. The program team, headed by Dwight Pullen, handled the bulk of the IT-related work during the early stages of the project. This included database administration, the implementation of a document management system, the development of a Web-based invoicing system to process purchase orders from multiple contractors, and the selection and implementation of a project management system from Primavera Systems Inc. The system was used to track the work done and invoices submitted by the hundreds of consultants working on the airport projects. Beginning in 2003, the challenge for the departments developing IT group was to gradually take over support for the systems that the project program team had put in place. We really needed them to adopt these systems and take ownership, says Pullen.

Handing off a project in midflight is difficult under any circumstances. In this kind of situation, two things must be managed concurrently: the transition of responsibilities and the stability of the project, says Howard Rubin, an analyst at Gartner Inc. Typically, IT executives underestimate or misunderstand the core skill sets that are in-house and that are needed to make a project successful, he adds.

Indeed, the initial transfer of responsibilities was hardly smooth. Id be remiss to say there werent any hiccups, says Pullen. For example, a big part of the handoff involved transferring knowledge, but initially, that was hard. Although the department was adding IT staff, it was still relying on contractors, and a steady turnover in their ranks made the transition difficult.