Have you noticed that whenever problems are uncovered in public service organisations we are assured that “lessons have been learned” ? The implication being that we don’t need to worry our silly little heads, we should move along and that our hard earned cash is secure with them. These lessons are never cheap and the latest one has cost us a cool £110m:

The ambitious redevelopment of Broadcasting House in central London cost the BBC more than £100m extra than it had originally planned.

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It means a total extra overspend of £110m resulting from delays and complications on the redevelopment of the 78-year-old building.

Note that the BBC is saying £100m on their news bulletins and making the claim about lessons being learned.

Now I’m not daft enough to believe that mistakes are never made and that on a project as long and complex as this changes have to be made which inevitably means more money; that’s why we always budget for contingencies. So I’m going to assume that this £110m is over and above normal contingency budgeting, because I can’t be arsed to read the report and because that is how it should be read in the real world.

In this case the lessons learned argument isn’t good enough and heads should roll. The time to learn lessons is when we are junior managers and our mistakes aren’t that costly. As we make these mistakes we build up what we call experience. As we increase our experience we move up the management ladder and apply that experience to make sure that big mistakes don’t happen. We do that by supervising our juniors and making sure their cumulative mistakes don’t get out of hand and by not fucking up our selves.

The way we are prevented from making big mistakes is by having  reporting mechanisms so that project boards and finance teams can keep a constant eye on project costs and timescales. This way there is always a chance to either nip problems in the bud, sign off on any new requirements or sack the project manager(s) and bring in someone with more experience and discipline.

So, someone, somewhere screwed up big time. Either in the original appointments of the senior project teams of in supervising them. Either way that someone should be singled out and fired, however I suspect they are long gone and hiding in some other dark corner of our public service organisations.

The only lesson that has ever been learned is that public bodies are incapable of conceiving and implementing grand projects, but that doesn’t stop them happening.

Perhaps a clue to why these lessons are never headed is given by the way the BBC has put this in its entertainment section.