HMRC delivers the chancellor’s COVID-19 schemes

It’s not often we heap praise on the taxman, but the team who successfully delivered the UK’s economic response to the coronavirus crisis under immense pressure deserves it

“These have been the most challenging projects of my career, but also by far the most rewarding,” said Joanna Rowland, director of the COVID-19 Response Unit at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), in an exclusive interview with Project. Rowland is the senior responsible officer in charge of delivering Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s flagship economic interventions, including the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS), the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme, the Eat Out to Help Out Scheme and the Job Retention Bonus.

Rowland was given a month at the end of March to create a team that could design and deliver the CJRS – otherwise known as the furlough scheme – dispatching 10,000 operational HMRC staff. The scheme allowed employers to claim financial support of up to 80 per cent of salaries, up to a maximum of £2,500 per month, per employee, and was launched successfully on 20 April – 10 days ahead of schedule.

According to Rowland, 140,000 employers made a claim on day one, and so far, more than 9.6 million jobs have been furloughed from 1.2 million employers, with the total value of claims standing at £33.8bn. Around 6,000 full-time equivalent hours were spent by HMRC staff working on the coronavirus response at the peak.

Project principles at its core

At the heart of her team’s success were some “good old-fashioned project principles: knowing our purpose, creating urgency, deploying the right skills and topping that off with relentless determination”, Rowland explained. She used a hub-and-spoke model of specialists drawn from HMRC who connected to a central core project team. Rowland and digital and chief information officer Mark Denney coined the central guiding principle for the programme – ‘Ruthlessly Simple’. This allowed the team to focus on the core purpose of getting “the money to those who were entitled to it as fast as we could”, she said.

Project management disciplines were a major part of the success of the furlough scheme’s delivery, according to Rowland. “It was project management advice right at the point of conceiving the policies that was part of this success,” she said. “It is project management that turned the ingredients of success into success.”

Unique collaboration

Rowland was also given unprecedented access to Number 11, and her team had buy-in from all areas of Whitehall. “This was key to our ability to make decisions quickly and to our subsequent success,” she explained. “I spent many an exciting evening and weekends on the phone to Chancellor Rishi Sunak and his advisors, discussing policy and design options and their implications,” she explained.

“One of the reasons why we’ve been able to implement them [the schemes] so fast is that implementation was built into the design of the policy – and for these schemes to achieve their objectives, they had to be delivered fast, otherwise they wouldn’t have worked,” HMRC’s chief executive Jim Harra told Civil Service World.

That meant “getting the people with expertise about how you put this thing in place working alongside the policymakers, who are thinking about what sort of detailed rules and conditions they want to have. The other thing was making it the department’s number-one operational priority. So we really sunk our whole effort and attention into getting these schemes over the line on time or early, if at all possible. So, it was both working well together in integrated teams and just sheer organisational focus,” said Harra.

Also critical to the furlough scheme’s success was the adoption of a “truly agile” approach to the project, according to Rowland, which was necessary to deliver the scheme in time, and to continue with improvements until its scheduled wind-down in October.

Delivering in a crisis

“It is quite impressive that HMRC was able to implement the schemes so quickly,” Alexander Budzier, director of Oxford Global Projects and fellow in management practice at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford, told Project. “We know that often their projects take a very long time to implement. However, we also see this in other areas of major projects – the extreme urgency of responding to the health and economic crises that COVID-19 caused has created a single focus. Many projects have been successful at delivering crisis solutions where normally all sorts of conflicts stand in the way of changes,” explained Budzier.

He believes that it will be difficult for any organisation to hold onto the gains from a successful crisis response. While some process innovations will simply become business-as-usual, the urgency and single focus that is so beneficial at the moment will be near impossible to recreate, he believes. “Even so, projects and their organisations should learn from the crisis. What has worked? What did not work? What should we continue, stop or start doing in the future? Who were the experts and essential people that got us through the crisis? How has it changed the relationship between every team member and the project? How have our values as an organisation changed?”

Budzier’s advice to programme managers tasked with delivering project benefits fast is, first, to know your benefits – perhaps not all of them, but at least the five key benefits in a core process that is changed by the project. “Demonstrate small, then scale up,” he said. “Make sure that your narrative fits the audience. Throughout COVID-19 we managed to move things to ensure the health and safety of employees, but if you then talk about cost-cutting, the project’s benefits realisation will run into trouble. In short, focus, be clear about the purpose of what you are doing and always be able to tell ‘what’s in it for me’.”

Fast movers

Stephen Carver, senior lecturer in change project and programme management at Cranfield University School of Management, said of HMRC’s handling of the government’s programme that: “Bearing in mind the rapidity, huge and ongoing unknowns and conflicting expert advice, I was pleasantly surprised that so much happened so quickly. It is very easy in hindsight for people to criticise, mock and find fault, but I would say to those people: ‘I’d like to have seen how you would have done better’.”

What’s critical to get right when leading a complex programme under pressure, he said, is not to think that it is “a complicated problem that requires a planned right answer. It is in fact a complex situation that requires leadership, communication and a ‘fast fail’ culture. You can’t control your way out of a complex problem – you have to dance with it,” Carver said.

The momentum and focus created in response to the crisis must not be lost. “Over the last 10 years I have seen over-governance and over-compliance lead to a state of learned helplessness in many organisations. One positive side of this crisis is that many teams have empowered themselves and have been amazed at how well they have actually got things done. My fear is that this wonderful unleashing of potential will be smothered and extinguished by those who prefer process over outcomes,” he added.

Joanna Rowland spoke to Project editor Emma De Vita about her work throughout the pandemic for The APM Podcast’s ‘Crisis Talks’ series, available now at apm.org.uk/resources/the-apm-podcast

Tips for dealing with projects under pressure

It’s critical to decentralise decision-making and authority.
Hold teams accountable to deliver solutions.
Experiment with new solutions.
Ensure that good governance balances the need for crisis response with technical debt (that is, the stuff that in the future needs to be cleaned up because the crisis response took some short-cuts).
Unleash and trust your team, fail fast, be bold and ask for forgiveness, rather than permission.
Communicate, communicate and communicate some more.
Enjoy! Complex times demand creative thinking.