Fourteen Owners, No Ownership
A local authority's programme to merge three waste-collection services has a vision statement and a benefits register with 14 benefits, each with a named owner. Six months in, a review finds that nine of the 14 owners have not looked at their benefit since sign-off and two have left the authority. The programme dashboard shows benefits as "on track" because the underlying projects are on schedule. The chief executive, who sponsors the programme, asks the board why residents are complaining more about missed collections since the programme started, when the benefits register predicts fewer complaints.
1. What has gone wrong, and how should the programme manager describe it?
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The register has become a wish list and the dashboard is measuring the wrong thing.
Three distinct failures, which should be described separately because they need different fixes:
- Ownership is nominal. A named owner who has not looked at a benefit in six months, or who has left, is a name, not an owner. Ownership means someone with operational authority who is accountable for a measure and acts on it. Nine of 14 failing that test means the benefits management process is running as an administrative ritual.
- Measurement is a proxy. 'On track' is derived from project milestones, which tells you whether deliverables are being produced, not whether outcomes are changing. Project delivery and benefit realisation can diverge indefinitely, and here they have.
- The register is missing dis-benefits. Rising complaints is an adverse outcome of the change and belongs in the register, not outside it being explained away.
The complaint rise should be treated as the most valuable data point in the review: it is the only real outcome measure anyone has produced in six months, and it is pointing the wrong way.
2. What should the programme manager do in the next 90 days, and what should be said to the chief executive?
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Actions:
- Cut 14 benefits to five or six that can actually be measured. A register nobody can manage is worse than a short one.
- Re-contract each owner with their line manager present, on a specific measure, baseline and review date. Where the owner has left, appoint and brief a successor - do not leave the benefit orphaned.
- Add dis-benefits, starting with missed collections, and link the register to operational KPIs the service already reports rather than inventing new ones.
- Set a benefit realisation review cadence tied to the tranche plan, and stop deriving benefit status from milestone status on the dashboard.
- Investigate the complaints as a possible design problem in the merged service: three services merging into one collection round may genuinely have degraded service in some areas. That is a blueprint question.
To the chief executive, say plainly: 'On track' has meant projects on time, not benefits on track - the dashboard conflated the two and I am correcting it. Nine of 14 benefit owners are not engaged, and two have left. Complaints are up and are not currently in the register. Here is a corrected picture and a 90-day plan to make benefits measurable, with named owners and dates.
The programme manager should own the measurement gap rather than presenting it as bad luck, because the sponsor's confidence going forward depends on believing the next report more than the last one.