No hurdle is too high for our engineers; even the Scottish weather.

An upgrade of the RBS Castlebay branch, on the isle of Barra, Outer Hebrides, was scheduled for deployment in late November 2021. This was part of the Branch Transformation Programme that BT & Coview have been delivering for the Royal Bank of Scotland group.

The missing router

Each transformation requires three Cisco routers and switches for the branch to be migrated onto the new platform. In the case of Castlebay things did not go quite to plan. Although two of the parcels were successfully delivered to site, the third accidentally ended up at the Inverness depot.

The Project Team were informed of this wayward delivery only 24 hours prior to the upgrade. At this point the parcel was 170 miles away from the port of Glasgow, with a 10-hour ferry trip to the Isle of Barra.

The BT/Coview Project Team, BT Supply Chain and Parcel Force swung into action and the rogue parcel was transported overnight, from Inverness to Glasgow, ready for the single, daily ferry sailing the following morning.

Unfortunately, there was more bad luck. The parcel arrived at the port on time but in an unexpected turn of events, the ferry was cancelled due to storms.

At this point, ‘Right First Time’ milestones and commercial agreements are mitigated by extenuating circumstances so BT/Coview was ‘off the hook’ contractually.

A daring plan

However, our team didn’t want to disappoint the RBS employees and local community in Barra who were eagerly waiting for this upgrade, so they swiftly looked for an alternate plan. They found a small commercial flight to the Isle of Barra and seized the opportunity to fly out late Tuesday morning from Glasgow.

Barra Airport is famous for its scenic setting: it’s actually a beach, with flights timed to coincide with the tides. Despite the bad weather threatening to cancel the flight, the package, along with a Parcel Force courier, arrived safely in Barra. The router was handed straight over to a Coview engineer waiting on the beach.

With the router safely on site, the team were able to successfully complete the migration of the RBS branch, with enhanced network services and Wi-Fi coverage now available to both customers and staff.

It was almost a happy end to the story, but our Engineer was stranded on the island for an additional day because the ferry back was also cancelled. Luckily, the local hotel was very hospitable and could put him up for the night.

A fantastic effort by everyone involved and a great example of how we always go the extra mile for our customers.