Many new projects in a changing economy like ours straddle different sectors of economic and social activity. They raise concerns and interests which overlap, while requiring wide-ranging methods of regulation, management, supervision and control. Part of the success secured by other societies followed from their ability to manage complex change processes. These reflect the increasingly complex technical characteristics of key projects required to promote national development.

They also arise from the ever-widening welter of economic and social concerns that have come to bear on development projects. For instance, 50 years back, environmental concerns were hardly top priority in the evaluation and launching of new project proposals. Today such concerns, rightly, define the ways by which government and the private sector frame administrative and technical action.

Faced with the need to master modern complexity, administrators and consultants frequently claim that the classic structures of government organisation are no longer adapted to meet the challenges satisfactorily. Such structures were designed in more orderly times when the government was involved with much less, and when public expectations were not as high as they stand today. On the other hand, there are those who consider this critique as too simplistic, since public projects of significance have always, from the days of Babylon to now, required an extensive marshalling of resources.

Project management

This point cannot be completely shunted aside but, for the purposes of what follows, let us assume that modern complexity is vastly more onerous than a century or 50 years ago. For instance, consider a project for the government to set up a new industrial estate in partnership with the private sector. Consider the aspects that will be involved (not all):

• identification of the project, then of its parameters (technical, financial and what have you);

• negotiations as relevant with private sector interests; selection and evaluation of site from all relevant perspectives, including the environment;

• the drawing of technical plans;

• the arrangement, launching and adjudication of tenders;

• the bringing together of providers of infrastructural facilities;

• the organisation of a transparent and efficient process by which planning and other permits are sought and obtained;

• the beginning and completion of building and technical works;

• the provision of public finance and supervision of spending;

• the setting up of a management to run the estate when finished, plus the drawing up of procedures by which to assign factories to applicants;

• the political fronting for the project as a whole, in and outside Parliament.

You will say: but this is what project management is all about. True. That it can go wrong, though, is all too evident.

Consider the huge overruns and organisational mistakes that have been committed and endured over the Tal-Qroqq hospital project. Yet again, some will say, it used not to be so difficult in the past. When the Knights set about building Valletta with its wide array of fortifications, they managed to have most of the city’s framework in place within 10 years. In the 1970s, a new major runway that could take Boeing 747s with all its attendant facilities was completed in record quick time.

What then has been going wrong?

The truth is we have not yet mastered the skills of managing large-scale projects in time and with efficiency. The private sector too has taken a long time to catch up, as a number of failures in the recent and not-so-recent past demonstrate: from the original Verdala Hotel, to Price Club and Chambrai. It still needs some way to go. In the public sector, however, we lag direly behind. We should look at the structural reasons that might account for this failure, putting aside, for the present, the institutional, social and political rationales that clutter administrative machinery.

Non-routine

For project management cuts across the administrative responsibilities of organisations set up to run clearly structured operations. These organisations cope best with routine, or with exercises which can be reduced to routine. By their very nature, developmental projects undermine routine. They require new responses to emerging situations. They do so simultaneously across the different areas which they cover, creating uncertainties, heightening the perception of risk among decision-makers used to routine. All the time, too, these projects stand the great risk of becoming politicised or of being perceived as politicised.

A natural response to such a situation is to seek coordination among the different organisational players involved. Very often, this ends up as management by committee; alternatively, some leader is chosen from among the organisations involved or from outside. These approaches all too soon lead to creeping paralysis.

My experience of committees has been that they move forward at the pace of the slowest participant, if not slower. Also, they serve to fudge responsibilities, so that progress is recorded not by way of decisions implemented, as much as through the agreement achieved when the minutes of previous meetings are read. Action takes the form of letter-writing and waiting for replies to such letters. Meanwhile, projects limp along, while monies continue to be spent.

Even when coordinating committees delegate executive powers to a leader, one or more participants might find it useful to ignore or dawdle over the directives the leader issues, on behalf of the committee. Turf wars abound. An end result is that meetings and counter-meetings are held to agree all over again on what has been done, or perhaps reverse decisions.

The relevant word is another fashionable one: ownership. Who “owns” the project, in the sense that he/she is responsible for driving it forward, and has the power to make decisions stick? All too often, it suits nobody from the traditional departments to see such an ownership with its concomitant “power” assigned, since this would amount to a reduction of the turf over which departments rule.

“New” organisations

These and other factors led people over the years to push for the creation of new-type public organisations with the ability to override the complications of project implementation in new areas of crucial interest to development, such as tourism and industrial programming, or social welfare. It was held that such organisations could be designed to have the multi-functional, multi-disciplinary capabilities that “normal” departments were unable to project.

The debate about the effectiveness or otherwise of such structures spans much of the 20th century. It ranges from the early experiences of Soviet Russia, to the reform programmes of the Roosevelt years in the US, to the projects carried out in the developing countries of Africa and Asia post the 1950s. In Malta, there were three waves of experimentation with hybrid structures that tried to create the flexibility and initiative, which government departments of the traditional sort allegedly could not provide.

In the 1960s, under the Borg Olivier administrations, the trend emerged towards corporations created by special law to administer crucial areas of public activity, such as central banking and industrial development. This trend was continued under the Mintoff governments of the 1970s, with the creation among others of infrastructural corporations, either under a special law (such as Enemalta) or as commercial companies (Air Malta and later Sea Malta).

Later still, under the Mintoff administrations, a second trend became prevalent: government companies were set up either to operate as commercial ventures (they had a short life) or to run quasi-infrastructural projects (such as in bulk buying), sometimes in joint venture with private sector interests. The idea here – as always – was that such companies would have a better chance of performing well because they were not dependent on the cumbersome procedures of the civil service to run their operations. Most of them went bankrupt.

The third wave of quango creation happened under the Fenech Adami/Gonzi administrations of the 1990s and up to now. A plethora of structures from companies and agencies, to authorities and foundations was set up – is still being set up – to deal with a wide range of niche activities, in economic, cultural, social and environmental affairs, among others. The argument still goes that on such a basis, things can be carried out more effectively.

Integrated delivery

Put to the side the self-serving arguments of politicians that nest within the “theoretical” justifications for these structural “innovations” – in reality, all that politicians in power could be aiming for is better control of patronage and spoils. The question remains: have the new organisations been able to deliver what they were designed to deliver?

And the answer is no. They have been hamstrung in operational terms, by the same difficulties that undermined the effectiveness of departmental organisations when it came to running complex projects. They have not come anywhere close in administrative terms, to creating the coordination and impetus across a wide swathe of important sectoral activities that is needed if complex change processes are to succeed. Indeed, the “new” organisations have turned out to be as inflexible and as rigid in their ways of running things as the structures they were to replace.

This became evident early on. So, we had the repeated calls for the creation of one-stop agencies, which could, at one sweep, clear obstacles in the path of new projects, and fix all permits and administrative fiats needed by a project before it could be launched. These calls too, well-meaning though they were, missed the point. It was hardly the structure of government organisations charged with complex projects that created problems. What mattered more was the lack of something that integrated the concern to carry out a given project, gave it impetus and provided it with effective implementation tools.

It is pointless to require that the Malta Development Corporation or its replacement, Malta Enterprise, function as a one-stop agency, if it still needs to interface in long complex discussions with the Planning Authority, with the utilities, with the Finance Ministry, with the Employment and Training Corporation among others, and still has to wait for their reactions before it can deliver satisfactory replies to new investors. The discussions that MDC or ME will have to undertake are equivalent in time and energy to those that any other department would have to go through. So where are the savings of having a quango to carry out the required tasks?

Indeed, the reality could be that quangos increase management costs for the government system as a whole. It now has to bear the burdens of a double bureaucracy – that carried by the quango itself, and that carried by the departments it should have replaced but which still function.

All this is not an argument in favour of a full return to the departmental set-up. But it points to the imperative for integrative mechanisms to be devised which effectively push forward government initiatives, since these tend to get undermined as they negotiate over multiple administrative requirements. With time, I have come to the conclusion that it is not organisational structures that are key to a solution of this problem: you could solve it successfully either through a departmental structure (suitably modernised) or through some form of quango.

But the real key is having the right kind of people to manage it. And the expression “right kind of people” is phrased with a purpose. The choice has got nothing to do with whether the people concerned are fat or thin, morose or jocular, far-sighted or myopic, decisive or vacillatory. Rather, it depends on whether the people concerned are in a position that allows them to drive things fast and effectively, across the administrative turf of disparate organisations.

Who can?

Civil servants, acting as civil servants, will not be able to do it since they must refer to the departmental remit within which they function. Nor can quango chairmen and CEOs do it, no matter what the current ideology proclaims about how they fit the bill for effectiveness. As individual decision-makers, they cannot operate independently of the constraints within which they have been placed. Nor do they have the institutional strength to carry through project proposals which inevitably bring in their wake incomprehension and resistance. To do so at the end of the day, they need political power.

Which is where the politicians come in. Structurally, they are best placed to inject an integrative impetus that would bring cohesion and direction to development projects. They do not have any long-term commitments to administrative structures of the departmental or quango variety – to turf. They must relate their actions to the needs and aspirations of communities, families and individuals. By definition, such a brief goes beyond a narrow focus on the ways by which a given organisation operates. If something needs to be done, it must be done.

Admittedly, this refers primarily to the political requirements, sometimes very short-term, which condition a politician’s life. Even so, such requirements do cut across organisational boundaries. They do impose time limits for speedy action. They do encourage action that does not respect traditional ways of doing things, if these inhibit forward movement. They do reflect popular aspirations, which increasingly tend to press for quick and innovative measures.

Admittedly too, a number of politicians cannot rise up to this task. They will be found incompetent, interested uniquely in parochial matters, lacking a vision for the future, and so on and so forth. But those of them who possess the right spark could find themselves in the best position ever to encourage an integration of governmental action that might get development projects to really move forward. Or the best and brightest among politicians could delegate their power and vision to others who operate in more structured environments, enabling such people to make project management work. I am not saying this out of imagination or dreamwork, but because I have seen it happen…

Of course, there are cons to the proposal that politicians are best placed to ensure that projects for national development are run as an integrated and successful process. The cons get stressed so often that it makes sense today to emphasise that there is another side to the coin.