The Project 2.0

The state mimics the practices of business management to display ideological loyalty as much as for any practical reason. But the adoption of novel techniques often involves a time-lag. Why, if conformity is instinctive? It is not because of the innate conservatism of the Civil Service or a lack of commercial familiarity among politicians. Nor is it a weakness of democracy or a lack of market incentives. There are plenty of examples in the twentieth century, at least up to the 1980s, of the state being at the leading edge of new management techniques and technologies. Rather it reflects the growth of the mediating role of business consultancies and outsourcers. As parasitical entities, they don't originate new ideas but adopt them instrumentally once proven elsewhere. In practice, they tend to dilute and bastardise those ideas, their prime directive being not to evolve themselves but to maintain profitable cashflows from government contracts. The result is that their inhouse culture is often antiquated and their methods regressive (the emblematic case is business process outsourcing, which often involves reverting to older technology augmented by cheap manual labour). 

A good example of this time-lag is Agile, which came to prominence in the 1990s in software development, later branching out into project management and manufacturing, but took a couple of decades to reach the public sector. A further decade on, we see evidence of Agile practices spreading to the political hinterland of internal party management. Though the recent high-profile example is Labour, you can be confident that elements of this are also encroaching elsewhere. The intention of Keir Starmer and David Evans is that "Labour will work “collaboratively” in “multidisciplinary teams”, which will “adopt a product-mindset using agile ceremonies, be empowered to make decisions and encouraged to focus on rapid prototyping, deployment and iteration”." ("ceremonies" in this context means short, focused meetings, often standing up, that typically mark the start and end of a day). What are we to make of a political party that runs itself as a project with a product deliverable? To understand this, we need first to understand Agile.

Software methodologies, and their related project management styles, reflect the material base, which in practice means that they underwent a major change when mainframe systems were replaced by networked mini-computers and PCs in the 1990s. The 1970s and 80s were marked less by a single industry-wide methodology than by a metaphor that described a whole series of proprietary system approaches: Waterfall. In fact, the better metaphor would have been a cataract, a series of major phases, each of which wasn't started until the preceding one was completed. Those phases were: requirements, design, implementation, verification and maintenance (these were later refined with the addition of a sixth phase, analysis, before design). Though logically sequential, the obvious problem was that errors or mistaken assumptions in one phase might not come to light until later, at which point they would prove costly to address, often leading to incomplete or out of specification software that necessitated further corrective releases. Another metaphor would be a train that can only go forwards.

This led to an appetite for an approach to software development that incorporated feedback and allowed for earlier, less costly correction of errors. As software coding became easier with the arrival of fourth generation languages (4GL) in the 1980s, and as running code was no longer a laborious process of compiling and booking precious time slots on a mainframe, an iterative, lightweight approach began to dominate in the 1990s, reflected in distinct methodologies such as RAD, Scrum, DSDM and XP. These were collectively termed Agile, emphasising their common responsiveness and flexibility. As prototyping and iterative releases improved code quality, what quickly became clear was that the chief focus of that agility was not programming but responding to changes in the user requirements. This placed a greater emphasis on close collaboration with the software sponsors and users, which in turn required a more people-centric approach to project management: more focused meetings and negotiation, fewer Gantt charts and reports. The reliance on iterative releases and testing was also congruent with Silicon Valley culture ("Fail fast, fail forward" etc) and would prove highly suitable for the development of smartphone apps.

Naturally, the 1990s was the moment that the British government chose to adopt PRINCE2, a highly prescriptive Waterfall-style project management methodology that would subsequently be implicated in many of the high-profile IT failures of the New Labour years. As night follows day, a change in government in 2010 led to a desire to change the approach, with the result that Agile techniques started to appear. The prime example of this was Universal Credit, announced by Iain Duncan Smith in 2011, where the employment of Agile initially foundered on the Waterfall nature of government procurement. The project was reset in 2013 and Agile persevered with through to system launch in 2018. Despite delays - predictable given the highly-contentious nature of the system and frequent changes in policy - it is now displaying genuine agility. Of course, that's agility in response to the DWP's demands, not the needs of benefit claimants who still have to suffer the system's implacable discipline.

Universal Credit marks the point at which Agile enters the mental frame of the UK political class, initially as a silver bullet for complex software development and then as a more general approach for running a project. The variety of Agile methodologies can be plotted on a spectrum that runs from what is partly a cosmetic rebranding of older approaches, such as DSDM with its hybrid Waterfall structure, to more radical departures that question wider business practices, such as eXtreme Programming (XP). This has inevitably taken on a political dimension with XP in particular being accused of having socialist tendencies due to practices such as pair-programming and principles such as collective ownership. This is ironic given that the traditional caricature of socialism, i.e. as practised in the Soviet Union, is essentially the Waterfall approach: Marx and Engels provided the requirements, Lenin the design, Stalin the implementation, Khruschev the verification and Brezhnev the maintenance. You could argue that Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika were proto-Agile practices.

A more subtle understanding of the sociology of software development is that the demand for Agile practices, which emerged in the US and UK among developers and junior project managers rather than being imposed from on high, reflects not simply a desire for greater worker autonomy but for personal distinction in a profession that, while it lacks formal credentials and is often highly exploited, is demonstrably middle class in its culture and rewards (e.g. the startup promise of equity). As Michael Eby describes it, Agile reflects "a relatively affluent subset of the younger working population, disaffected with the heteronomy of work, and emphasizing affective-existential themes like boredom, dehumanization, inauthenticity and meaninglessness". In support of this interpretation, it's worth noting that offshore software development teams in developing nations like India still tend to follow a hierarchical Waterfall approach, even if working to the designs of product managers and software architects in the West who fully practise Agile. What holds this together across timezones is the project.

Many of the practices and concepts outlined by David Evans in his reformation of the Labour Party machine, such as multi-disciplinary teams and core functions, long predate Agile, going back to the mid-to-late twentieth century tenets of process engineering and total quality management. The common theme is the project. By now you'll have recalled that "the project" was the catch-all term used to describe New Labour. Whereas Margaret Thatcher would ask "Is he one of us?", Tony Blair's question was "Is she onboard?" (project onboarding is actually a thing). Much of the managerialism that we associate with New Labour was based on the Waterfall model, such as the key role of lobbyists and think-tanks in setting the parameters of design (i.e. requirements and analysis), the importance placed on testing against quantitative targets rather than qualitative outcomes (i.e. verification), and the separation of responsibility for implementation, operations and maintenance (i.e. outsourcing). 

In effect, we're looking at the same project mentality, only now in the raiments of Agile practice. However, it's clear that Labour under Starmer and Evans are chiefly interested in the more mechanistic practices, to the point where some become ossified in jargon like "ceremonies". What's missing is any reference to those humane values and principles that (however self-indulgently) characterise Agile, and particularly the supposedly more leftwing methodologies like XP, such as feedback, respect and courage. This hasn't sprung out of nowhere. You don't need the full Forde Report to recognise that the right of the Labour Party has been running a project since 2016. I would describe it as Agile insofar as it adopted an iterative approach towards the challenge of unseating Jeremy Corbyn - the chicken coup, the antisemitism flap, the 2nd referendum debate - but I don't see much evidence beyond that. Policy development has been weak (i.e. few deliverables), vision has been notable by its absence (no system metaphor), and the party's campaigning, both in by-elections and more generally, has been uninspiring when not catastrophic (repeatedly failing unit tests).

In reality this is a top-down, Waterfall project that seeks to reengineer the party to the point where the left can never secure the leadership again. Everything else appears to be subservient to that one key deliverable. This will be a multi-phase project that will likely condemn the party to opposition for a decade, but as the chatter about a "Kinnock moment" suggests, that is considered a price worth paying. The absence of many Agile principles and values is telling, but the meaning of the jargon promoted by Evans is also pretty transparent: the "hub and spoke" model will centralise authority and emasculate the regions; "serving the needs of voters first" means further disempowering CLPs and relying on focus groups; a "product mindset" and "rapid prototyping" mean that policy will again be subservient to the fickle opinion of the media; while the emphasis on "collaboration" is clearly intended to prepare the ground for more consultants unaccountable beyond the leader's office, like the recently-recruited Philip Collins. It's the same old project that the party right have been pursuing, in one form or another, since the 1950s. It remains overdue and over budget.