Redefining the target

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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.

Numerical targets miss the point

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The statement by the First Minister on Monday that no new target for the number of coronavirus tests to be carried out would be set has unsurprisingly provoked criticism from political opponents. They’ve seen an open goal and aimed at it, even if the Tories’ criticism is more than a little hypocritical given the abject failure of their own government in London to get anywhere near its own targets. And, given that there are reports of rifts within the English cabinet (and, when it discusses health issues, it is indeed acting as an English cabinet not a UK one) as to whether the targets are meaningful or useful anyway, they might be about to be outflanked by their own side. Still, I suppose that’s balanced by Labour’s own hypocrisy in abandoning such a target in Wales whilst continuing to criticize the English Health Minister for not achieving the target he set for England.

On the substance of the issue, I have considerable sympathy for the First Minister’s position. There is little point setting targets which may turn out to be unachievable on issues over which you do not have complete control; it simply sets people up to fail and presents opposition parties with an open goal. And the ‘target’ in this case looks to have been entirely arbitrary – geared more to a compromise between what they thought might be achievable and what would be politically acceptable rather than what is needed to deal with the problem. More generally, I’m not a fan of management or government by target anyway – it can often lead to the ‘wrong’ behaviour. I once sat through a meeting in a local authority at which a senior officer pointed out to the members that they were exceeding one particular target laid down by central government, and that one way of saving money would be to reduce the level of service in that area in order to merely meet, rather than exceed, the target. Targets are often set largely as a means of measuring and quantifying progress towards the achievement of an objective; they are just a proxy for the real goal but can end up being the sole focus. Managing to meet a target encourages people to concentrate on the targets rather than understand and pursue the underlying objective. In politics, they can also encourage oppositions to criticise a numerical failure rather than evaluate the quality of the response in relation to the problem which the government is seeking to solve. Easy headlines is no substitute for quality scrutiny.

That said, the disappointing part of the First Minister’s statement was not that there will be no target, but the absence of detail about how the government plans to achieve the underlying objective, which I assume is to do with identifying and getting on top of any new outbreak quickly before it gets out of control. It is clear that any such strategy inevitably involves conducting significantly more tests but trying to set a precise number is irrelevant – it could be lower (but is more likely to be much higher) than any number conjured out of the air. ‘Whatever it takes’ isn’t easily turned into a nice round number. It should, though, be turned into a strategy and plan, and that seems to be as absent in Wales as it is at UK level at present.

Windrush merely a symptom

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Many years ago, on some management course or other, I remember the lecturer stressing that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”.  As a general rule, it has considerable merit – how can you ever know whether you’re progressing towards a goal if you can’t somehow quantify that progress?  And as anyone subject to any sort of annual performance review will know, all targets are supposed to be SMART, where the M stands for measurable.  It struck me at the time, however, that there was something missing from this simplistic formulation, because the route selected to arrive at the goal is as important – and sometimes more important – than the goal itself.  Concentration on the measurability of progress leads to a target-chasing culture which can, and frequently does, ignore the wider needs of the organisation, its clients, and the people who work within it.

I found myself wondering yesterday whether those senior officials in the Home Office or its agencies who created the local targets of which their bosses were completely unaware (allegedly) for deportations had been on a similar course, but without applying any critical reasoning to the bald statement about the need for measurability.  What they seem to have done, in effect, is to take the overall policy handed down by their political masters (we must get immigration down, and we must deport illegals, and we will do so by creating a hostile environment for them) and turned that into performance targets for staff, following the standard SMART rules.  And, with their annual reviews decided on the basis of achieving the targets they were given, those staff have chased the targets relentlessly.  The staff have attempted to do what they were told was expected of them, and left wider considerations about the impact on those being pursued for deportation and the image and perception of their department to those on higher pay grades.

Now, as it happens, I disagree with the overall policy in principle, but even assuming that the policy itself was a sensible and desirable one, those who promoted it – basically May and Rudd – cannot simply absolve themselves of all responsibility, even it is entirely true that it was the senior officials who turned that policy into cold impersonal targets; not least because those at the very top are, and must always be, held responsible for the culture under which the organisation operates.  And what is clear, surely, by now is that they didn’t really care about the culture; they were completely obsessed with achieving the desired outcomes.  I will, though, also repeat a point made previously: those senior officials who took it upon themselves to implement a system of targets as a means of implementing the policy handed down to them cannot simply be absolved of their responsibility for dehumanising people by turning them into numbers.

There is also a wider political issue as well, which goes way beyond May and Rudd.  I can’t help but wonder whether the unfolding debacle around the Home Office’s attempts to deport more people, using an approach which appals many of us, might nevertheless be playing well amongst one of the Tories’ key target audiences.  All of this has, after all, come about because politicians have been keen to chase the votes of those opposed to immigration by being tough on immigrants.  An anti-immigrant culture has developed and spread, actively encouraged by politicians (and Labour have been as bad – just remember Ed Miliband’s famous mug)  in which it is perfectly possible that many will see the efforts of May and Rudd to be praiseworthy rather than contemptible.  Decades of anti-immigration rhetoric will not be overturned by a few cosmetic changes to policy, nor even by the resignations of May, Rudd, and the top officials involved.  The required cultural shift in political debate is much greater than that.