Having spent many years working on IT
projects, I’m well aware of the ways in which project managers can claim to
have met the objectives by the target date. They include subtle changes to the
objective, reducing the scope of the project, or implementing ‘phase 1’ of a
project which no-one previously understood was to be delivered in phases. And
they get away with things like this because it’s generally also in the
interests of the clients who’ve spent £millions to appear to have been
successful rather than to admit to failure.
After leaving university, the English
Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, briefly worked for his family’s software
company, and that may well be where he learned some of these tricks. A target
of carrying out 100,000 tests a day has morphed into a target of carrying out
100,000 tests on one particular day, and ‘carrying out’ has been redefined as ‘carrying
out or putting in the post’. Hey presto, target achieved! Having
counted 40,000 tests which are ‘in the post’ as being completed may leave him
with a slight problem or two: he can’t (although he might well try!) count
the same tests a second time when (or even if – the return rate is unlikely to
be 100%) they are returned, and it is doubtful if they can continue to despatch
40,000 by post every day.
Still, credit where credit is due – the number
of tests being conducted has undoubtedly increased significantly, and the
figure of 100,000 per day is and always was a wholly arbitrary target, which
may or may not be adequate for the task in hand, set as a rough proxy for the
underlying objective for the want of anything better. Focussing on the number
to such an extent means that they’ve been more concerned with saving the
Minister’s skin than with using the tests in the most useful way; as ever,
managing by targets invariably encourages focus on the target rather than the objective.
The more important question now is not an argument about whether the means by
which the number was achieved were fair or foul, let alone about the next
numerical target (the PM has previously talked about 250,000 per day), but
about how the increased testing capacity can best be used to achieve the
objective. I suspect the government will now find itself where innumerable IT
project managers have found themselves over the years: concentrating on
delivering ‘phase 1’ in a huge last minute panic means that they haven’t had
the time to even think about what phase 2 might look like or how it might be
delivered. And that leads me to also suspect that they will therefore end up
setting another meaningless and arbitrary target anyway, not least as a way of
diverting attention from the fact that they really haven’t got much of a clue
otherwise.
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