The big interview: Joanna Rowland

The director general of the COVID-19 Response Unit at HMRC has played a critical role in making the government’s economic interventions happen. Andrew Saunders meets the woman behind the furlough, income support for the self-employed and the Eat Out to Help Out schemes, which were all delivered so successfully that they even impressed the inventor of the World Wide Web.

Despite all the anxiety, uncertainty and grief that it has undoubtedly caused, the COVID-19 pandemic has not been without its occasional happier revelations: for example, that working from home works, and that many people really like it. And don’t forget the clearer skies and cleaner air where there were once traffic-clogged and polluted city streets. All told, COVID-19 has proved to be an opportunity to re-examine long-held assumptions, and a chance to come up with new and better ways of doing things. 

One product of that realisation was the moment on 20 April when the government’s ambitious plan to protect those jobs threatened by lockdown – the Coronavirus Jobs Retention Scheme (CJRS) – went live. Not only was it an innovative and unprecedented scheme to guarantee 80 per cent of workers’ income, but also a hugely significant tech project. The stakes could hardly have been higher – billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money and millions of jobs – or the deadline tighter, with a timescale of just four weeks from a cold start to launch. 

It’s hardly the sort of project that the UK government can boast an unblemished track record on. And yet despite the mixed auguries, the launch went off with barely a hitch. No websites crashed, and no ugly blame game ensued. It even won an admiring tweet from the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee. Surely that’s the kind of happy ending that every project manager wishes for before they go to bed at night? But, like a swan, the apparently smooth progress was only achieved thanks to some frantic paddling beneath the surface.

“It was a nerve-wracking launch,” says Joanna Rowland, who was then senior responsible owner (SRO) for the COVID-19 Response Unit at HMRC and the leader of not just the CJRS, more commonly known as the furlough scheme, but also its companion for the self-employed, the SEISS. “But I defy anyone to say that they could have done it quicker or better. Across the board, the absolute best in government got together and really pulled off the most amazing project.”

Such a major undertaking with very little in the way of precedent to go on, effectively putting HMRC’s immense revenue-collecting powers abruptly into reverse in order to distribute money instead, was not a job for the risk-averse. It could have been a hospital pass, the kind of moment when rocket-ship careers come crashing down to earth. But Rowland says she has always been eager to take on new challenges; the idea of saying ‘no’ when the call came in mid-March didn’t so much as cross her mind. “I’m someone who always says ‘yes’,” she admits. “It’s an appalling habit. ‘Yes’ is out of my mouth before my brain has had a chance to think it over.”

Indeed, far from putting her off, the daunting speed and ambition of the CJRS, which would go on to distribute almost £34bn and protect almost 10 million jobs in its first two and half months, was actually a big part of the appeal, she says. “Pace is just something I am naturally attracted to. I only have two speeds: stop and fast. And big projects are always high-stress and high stakes, so you have to be someone who is comfortable with that. I am probably a bit of an adrenaline junkie.”

As she is also quick to point out, there was an element of ‘cometh the hour, cometh the woman’ to her appointment. As a former programme director on HMRC’s flagship digital transformation programme, Making Tax Digital, Rowland knew the systems that the schemes would be based on, and she was keenly aware of her responsibility to step up as the department’s leading project professional. “I am head of the profession for HMRC, so it was natural that at a time when we really needed project management to come to the fore, I should lead it.”

The CJRS was followed less than a month later by the SEISS for the self-employed, which by August had distributed £7.8bn to some 2.7 million claimants. Here, the idea was to help those whose income had been interrupted as a result of the pandemic restrictions, allowing them to concentrate on looking after themselves and their families. And then came the Eat Out to Help Out scheme (yes, Rowland’s team did that one too), which in August part-funded 100 million restaurant meals to support the hard-hit hospitality sector.

“The self-employed scheme was harder to deliver than the CJRS because we were dealing directly with individuals rather than employers. I’ve also got a fondness for Eat Out to Help Out, because as a tax authority you don’t get to do that sort of thing very often,” she explains.

This has been the culmination of a career path that Rowland describes as “definitely not linear”. She left school after her A Levels with not much of a clue about how she wanted to spend her working life. “I didn’t go straight to university. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” she says. “I certainly didn’t think I’d end up doing what I do now.”

But she did know that she wanted to be successful at something and was prepared to knuckle down to achieve it. “My parents always had a very strong work ethic, which they passed on to me.” Even in her first job as a very junior civil servant at the Land Registry, the signposts to her future career as a project manager were there. Digitising land records meant typing a lot of paper documents into databases, but neither she nor many of her colleagues were much good behind a keyboard. “Typing skills were low, so immediately I set up a project to teach them. I’d never run a project in my life, but it was just in my DNA.”

After a maternity break, she joined the police service as a civilian – the start of a 13-year stint during which, she says, she really learned her trade. “That’s where my formal project initiation started. I introduced new computer systems, and we were the first force to bring in body-worn cameras for officers. I loved it.”

It was an experience that would stand her in good stead for leading the COVID-19 response at HMRC. “Without a doubt, policing helped me a lot. You're dealing with enormous risk every single day. It helps you to remain calm under pressure, and you also quickly learn to distinguish exactly what you need to do, and in what order. You gather the facts, understand your powers and then look at the policy.”

She also learned about the power of projects when it comes to translating intentions into outcomes. “You can have the greatest strategy and the best policy and the best IT plan. But you’re not going to improve anything or change anything without a project to get it done.”

The sheer urgency of the COVID-19 response allowed her to bring a new focus on the importance of delivery to the work. It’s an aspect which can sometimes play second fiddle to the quest for devising the perfect policy, she adds. “The policy was designed in part around delivery. It was about finding a workable balance. If deliverability is the primary consideration, then the chances are you will end up with an ineffective policy. The art is in how you reach the policy intent by very carefully crafting it in a way that maximises deliverability.”

It also created a rare opportunity to work directly with chancellor Rishi Sunak and his team, rather than through the many layers of the Civil Service’s usual channels.

“He and his Treasury colleagues were fantastically inclusive. I didn’t have to fight for airtime. My presence in the virtual room was as an equal partner, and they would naturally look at me and ask ‘Jo, is that deliverable?’ Because we only had four weeks, it was not in anyone’s interest not to listen to delivery.”

Rowland left the police service in 2014 after picking up a clutch of qualifications: the Police Senior Command Course, Programme Management at Saïd Business School’s Major Project Leadership Academy, and a master’s in criminology from the University of Cambridge. She then moved to the Ministry of Justice and the Criminal Justice Service Efficiency Programme.

That programme involved kitting out the court estate with the technology to handle digital evidence and new software to manage court listings, as well as tackling the human factor by bringing judges, barristers and court staff into the digital era. In the course of this, Rowland learned some important lessons about how and when to break the project management rules. “It was an interesting programme, totally against the rulebook because it had three SROs: the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and the Court Service.”

The secret to managing three bosses with different requirements? “Know the outcome you’re trying to achieve. That’s the golden rule,” Rowland explains. “It actually made me even more disciplined about what outcomes we were after and what success looks like.”

Delivering the CJRS and SEISS on such challenging timescales required a similarly off-textbook approach: paring back to bare essentials, working with a small core team and short-circuiting established procedures that were not adding value to the process. It also meant taking a novel approach to risk management. “Instead of opening the Excel spreadsheet of all the risks, I’d reframe risk as a conversation about the things that could stop us from being successful. Often, when you do that, the thing that is flashing red on your risk register is not the thing that is worrying other people most.”

What it did not mean, however, was abandoning the basic principles of governance simply in order to get something out the door quickly. “The reason we were able to work like that was because we stuck to project principles. Governance is a control mechanism, but it’s also mental resilience – it’s where we put into a controlled format all the things we needed to do, all the things we had decided and all the assumptions we needed to keep an eye on. Big projects are too big for any single human brain, and governance is just a way of codifying that.”

Having laid the foundations for a new way of running government digital projects, her focus now is on applying the lessons of COVID-19 more widely, especially in the light of the ongoing Civil Service reform agenda. “There are many aspects to the Civil Service reform agenda, one of which is to make sure that we are more delivery-focused, and the project profession will play a huge part in that.”

Promoted to temporary director general in August, Rowland’s first priority was the Jobs Support Scheme, a kind of furlough-lite that was intended to help businesses cope with the tier system in the same way that the CJRS helped firms handle full lockdown. But then lockdown part two intervened: the original furlough scheme has now been extended until March 2021 to help employers cope with the new restrictions, accompanied by further measures for the self-employed. The third SEISS grant for the November to January period will be calculated at 80 per cent of trading profits to a maximum of £7,500.

She and her team now stand ready to respond to any further interventions the government might require using their proven agile process. “There are often layers between the point of decision and action, but there is so much on the government agenda at present that there simply isn’t time to run through all the layers,” she says.

Beyond that, Rowland wants to spread the word that government really can be a champion of cutting-edge project delivery, and that the rewards of public service run deep. “The scale and diversity of projects available, there’s nothing quite like it. And everything we do, provided it’s delivered well, really does make a difference to society.”

And the personal rewards can be significant too. “After the furlough scheme was launched, I got an emotional card from one of my in-laws, saying that she had been furloughed and how much it meant to her. Things like that are priceless – that’s why we do it.”

Joanna Rowland

Born - 1975, Hampshire.

First job - Junior civil servant, Land Registry.

2011 - Head of custody and Criminal Justice, Hampshire Constabulary (final role of 13-year police career).

2014 - CJS Efficiency Programme director, Ministry of Justice. Oversaw a £160m project to create digital courtrooms and move away from paper-based processes.

2016 - Programme director, Making Tax Digital, HMRC. Responsible for the roll-out of the personal digital tax account used by more than 15 million taxpayers in 2018.

March 2020 - SRO, Coronavirus Jobs Retention Scheme/Self-Employed Income Support Scheme, HMRC.

August 2020 - Temporary director general, COVID-19 Response Unit, HMRC.

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