Committees: Changing HORSEs into CAMELs

Many moons ago, I found myself working very heavily with committees.

As an Information Manager for Mercury Communications I had made a couple of attendances at one particular forum at the request of one of our Maintenance Managers, a forum that brought together authorities and utilities for plant information exchange and coordinating road works.

Unknowingly, I must have made a good impression because not long after being made redundant from Mercury I was invited out of the blue to become the Project Manager for the committee for a collaborative arrangement and system that they were planning.

The project was being driven by the committee for a community-wide consultation, and my role was to use my skills and experience to add in the technology and to bring it all together for delivery.

How difficult could that be for a professional, even though I had never worked with committees before? 

It soon became apparent to me that although a committee may comprise of very clever and very well meaning people from many diverse organisations, the collective of a committee can be far less effective than the sum of the individuals in some circumstances.

A few members could be said to be 'drivers', but for many others the important part was not achieving the stated objectives of the committee, it was the fact that the committee existed and that they were personally on it.

Being feted and introduced as 'Chair of...[committee]' or 'member of...[committee]' in some cases gave the individual a status and standing that was way beyond that which they got from their 'day job'. 

The opportunity to form sub-committees was very keenly identified and taken.  Let's have a Project Assurance Team (PAT), one to consider Finance for the project, one for Specification and Design, one for Testing....etc.

Conscripts to sub-committees were taken from a smattering of those on the main committee (those with particular interest / specialisations on the subject), plus conscripts from the wider user-community, with a descending criteria of director / manager (main committee), supervisor (sub-committee) etc.  Also included in criteria was geography to ensure a full spread of people from all parts of the community.

At the compulsory go-round-the-table self-introductions at sub-committees it was often the case that people introduced themselves with name, committee-membership / role in the committee, day-job-title, employer.

To be asked to head up a sub-committee was a dream for some although you would not know it to look at them.  All heads went down when the need for a chair of a new sub-committee was raised, but many were actually hoping for nomination in truth.

The 'chosen one' was always meek in their acceptance, often citing that they were already bows-under with work but recognised the gravity of their newly bestowed duties, and pledged commitment.

Sub-sub committees were not uncommon either; let's have one to consider the needs of a specific stakeholder-type, another for another stakeholder-type etc.  And of course, each of these will need a Chairperson, chosen from the committee that had spawned the need for this sub-sub committee. 

Membership of these sub-sub committees followed pattern: a few nominated from the higher committee with new members from the community who were a further echelon down in superiority, e.g. actual users and operators.

At one point, I regularly attended 3 or 4, occasionally 5 or 6 meetings of some description every week, often 2 in the same day, at the good offices of one of the members of the committee of the moment.  And this went on for almost 2 years.

I used to love chicken, but a couple of solid years of meetings with buffets arranged by the host consisting of drumsticks / wings put me off chicken for the rest of my life.  Even today - over 20 years on - I would not thank you for chicken.

Purpose-bleed!  The amount of times that a sub-committee held lengthy debate on the considerations and conclusions of other sub-committees or even those of their sponsoring committee was unbelievable, always concluding however that 'that is not our remit, strike that from the Minutes'. 

And yet many attendees of the meeting, especially the Chair, were actually on the very same committee(s) that the meeting was holding under scrutiny!

As time went on there were the inevitable changes to personal circumstances that led to the departure of a committee member; promotion in their 'day job', redundancy, ill-health etc.  Treated almost as a bereavement, Minutes recorded the sad loss at their departure, best wishes for the future, and the gratitude of the committee for their contribution.

Not to worry though.  Many who had been made redundant soon returned with a new cap on, that of their new employer, slotting straight back into their old places even if these had already been back-filled in the meantime.  Even retirees were found funding to return as consultants or scribes.

Time also caused the bubbling up of 'stars' from sub or sub-sub committees, particularly if the Chair of their committee became vacant  A sub-committee Chair automatically became a member of the sponsoring committee.  Promotion!

Project theorists will tell you that purpose of a project / initiative committee is to take on an allocated task to the point where that task is complete and therefore the need for that committee is concluded.  It has a finite life, or rather it is supposed to.

But when you have a collective of people who have found a new personal definition of themselves by the fact they are on these committees this will not happen.  Some committees take it upon themselves to change their own brief, adopting a 'monitoring' role perhaps.  If not, the committee would be disbanded and all they will have are their day-jobs - and that will not do at all!  What will we do every second Tuesday of a month?

There are definitely professional committee attendees, those who inject themselves into committees / sub-committees, attending voluntarily if need be.  They become self-appointed oracles on what each committee is up to, who said what, any 'scandal' etc. and they delight in bringing this knowledge to the attention of all committees they attend.  Their briefcase is bulging with minutes, a confetti of documents that will not see the light of day from one meeting to the next.

Unkindly perhaps, in a few cases I concluded that such people were sent onto these committees by their employers because they could not be trusted with responsibility or budgets in their 'real jobs'.  You quickly saw why that would be.

It is impossible to debate finance or operating staff requirements (yes, a sub-committee for that too!) with individuals who, back in their real-jobs, are cost-centre managers that are having budget cuts / losing staff / under personal threat of redundancy.

Even more difficult to convince them of the need to make operating profits, if only for re-investment.  God forbid that anyone should actually make money out of this!  No, if more money is needed we will go through a process of justification, same as we have to.

And then we have those who already 'know' the answers - 'we do it this way, so should everyone else, why are we debating this', arms folded, a bored but frustrated look on their face. 

Or those who surprise the meeting by bringing along a 'guest specialist' from their parent organisation who serves to muddy what little clarity there is by contributing an unsolicited report that everyone takes away and reports back on having asked their own in-house specialists if there is any merit in this.

Or - the very worse - the committee member who has been reading up on these things and wants to specify technical details (platforms / products / databases / table structures / field-types etc.), forwarding these as specifications - even though requirements are not even identified yet.

And the more they think they know the greater their thirst.  As PM it is your job to try to keep them on subject (actually, strictly speaking it is the job of the committee chair to do that...), not give Master Classes in Data Normalisation / Entity Life History / Composite Logical Data Design etc.  Easier said than done sometimes, particularly when other members - even the committee chair - becomes intrigued by the subject and want to give it a go themselves.

A PM in these circumstances is an automatic member of every committee but always an outsider, a consultant at best, the receiver of all blame-allocation forms at worse.  Under no circumstances do they receive nomination for Chair, not even if the committee - of any level - is for the Project Plan or Technology.

If the PM is behind on any action, no matter how small, or perhaps cannot attend the meeting, the minutes record disappointment with the individual, and how this failure is delaying the entire Project.

But any other committee member can drag out delivery of their action with total impunity provided they continue - often over many meetings - to supply a reason that strikes a chord with others - real-job workload / annual leave etc. 

Requirement Specifications from committee deliberations are very interesting. 

In trying to accommodate all stakeholders - which generally requires several meetings even to gather these need in and debate them, almost certainly requiring a sub-sub or even several sub-sub-sub committees - a requirement that starts out as the accepted ideal is battered down until it becomes the lowest common acceptable solution.

Yet nobody is actually happy with the Requirement Specification; the more forward-thinking see it is a lost opportunity, those way behind record that they think it is a great idea for everyone else but cannot participate due to their own 'special' situation of finance / resources / technology / policy / security etc.

This is when a Highly Obvious Requirement for Something Equine (HORSE) becomes a Committee Agreed Mammal with Equine Likenesses (CAMEL).

A classic example of this happened when I was on a UK-wide, government-sponsored committee:

HORSE:  'We need a UK-wide service to provide free asset owner plans to anyone who needs them to protect services and assist with planning and health and safety'.  A no brainer requirement, who could argue with that?

A committee had been gathered of major asset owners, utility groups, contractors and other stakeholders, funded by the government and chaired by a knight of the realm. 

I was invited onto the committee as we had already a conducted a successful trial of just such an arrangement on behalf of the hosting member, in Cheshire.

We did not get much beyond introductions and initiative remit.  At the 2nd meeting it was announced that major stakeholders had walked away from the project entirely; one was unhappy that their own committee was not the one running the project, 3 others were not prepared to have to give away something for free that they were already making a lot of revenue from. 

Even more dropped out when they saw the Operating and Finance Plan which showed massive profits to the member hosting the forum, while the income side showed massive costs to everyone else.

CAMEL:  'Everyone must make their own arrangements'.  P.S. 'We will continue to meet as a group, we cannot let this initiative and its findings die off....we need to revise our remit / purpose / name.  We are going to form a sub-committee to identify what that should be...'.

Nowadays, I do not participate in any of these things but even yet I draw on some of the experiences it gave me. 

The biggest lesson it taught me that there are times when democracy is great provided only 1 person has it, if not the job will never get done, as obvious as the need may be. 

Please do not get the idea that I think that committees are not a good thing or that I do not respect the people I met and worked with on them.  Committees have a genuine role for bringing people together to define policies / co-operation / etc. - but they are not the beast needed for delivering  collaborative entities or systems.

You have to recognise that collaborative arrangements are prisms.  Each participant-type, indeed each individual participant, views the arrangement from their own perspective. 

A plan-requesting service to one participant (Enquirer) is a request-receiving service to another (Asset Owner).  Some may view it as a monitoring and reporting service (e.g. Authority), others yet may see it as an opportunity for audit trails.

Within this also lies the very real danger of exclusion.  A CAMEL will naturally only ever relate to the needs of the committee members.  All other parties are excluded, ignored, considered irrelevant even.  The world of the committee is the only perspective taken into account.

And if they are the ones paying for it no other parties can join in without paying an 'entry fee'.

It is impossible to predict all perspectives, and the more you ask the more perspectives you have to accommodate.  And the more perspectives you accommodate, the more people you have to ask to get their perspectives too.  It is a self-feeding cycle, one that can easily turn a 3-month project into a 5-year one.

If there is nothing in place, all that exists is ether-ware.  Ether-ware can do everything that any user can dream up but nothing that they can actually use.

The longer an arrangement or system stays as debated ether-ware the more elaborate each individual vision becomes of what it will be and do.

And as their ever-growing vision is that it will be a panacea to all problems, the greater their disappointment when the solution eventually becomes tangible. 'Oh, I thought it would [do something that nobody even thought of]'.

Requirements change due to change in legislation / codes of practice / new standards etc.  Who foresaw PAS 128?  Well, not in name, but National One Call was compliant before it was even considered.

Technology is transient and has in-built redundancy, so the more you become specific about which technologies are to be used the more you can paint yourself - and potentially your users - into a corner.  Remember fax machines?  Remember dial-up modems?  Remember DOS?  Who could have foreseen Broadband / tablets /apps?

Collaborative committees are big, slow machines to turn over.  By the time they have identified the need for a change, consulted on who thinks-what, debated and agreed the revised requirements, gone through costing / cost-allocation / authorisation / developed the change / tested it / approved it / released it etc., the change has often changed again.  And there will still be disagreement.

National One Call was deliberately built as an independent entity to provide services to all-comers without exclusions, services that clients use because they find benefit, in whatever way they perceive that to be.

It was consciously designed to avoid the barriers to participation of capital, operating finance, technology, ownership, design, specification, operation, even hubris, that killed off previous very well intentioned and expensive initiatives. 

It is no accident that we even provide free services to those who would otherwise not participate.

In this way it is a HORSE, one that cannot be morphed into a CAMEL.

All of the organisations and indeed many individuals that I met and sat on committees with now work with National One Call in one way or another.  No committee meetings, no capital investment, no Specification or Assurance Teams, all they do is use the service and it does what they each need it to do for them.  

Of course, we welcome feedback / suggestions from our clients and stakeholders and we tune our services for all users, and in some cases for a specific user.  We have that flexibility because we do not need to secure agreement /permission / funding from the world, his cousins and their dogs.

Build it and they will come has proved to be the only way that such a service could work in the UK.  We continue to improve our services using these guiding principles.

Alan McMaster is Managing Director of National One Call.  He delivered the Scottish Road Works Register as PM (later CEO) of Susiephone Limited, and delivered the Northern Ireland Road Works Register (NISRANS). 

Moleseye Limited was an MBO of the Susiephone operation, delivering the first UK-wide Dial Before You Dig service (which was bought by the MapInfo Corporation, now closed down), and he has been a member on numerous boards for UK-wide or regional DBYD / Roadwork Register initiatives.