The Anonymous Widower

A Project Management Approach to Better Justice

The whole justice system from victims, families on the brink of divorce and criminals, to the courts and ultimately prison is very much like an enormous project, such as building a new railway line or refurbishing a fleet of airliners.

The objectives are very similar.

1. Complete everything on-time and as close to the budget as possible.
2. Get a high satisfaction rating from customers, who in this case are victims, their families and in the civil courts those that litigate and seek redress.
3. Do all this within strict resource constraints, such as numbers of police, courts, judges and other legal staff.

So how would a good project manager build his railway line to meet the objectives?

There is an old phrase that Time is Money and I believe that this is something that the justice system in all its manifestation doesn’t address.

I can remember C coming home one day and saying that she’d finally got the details of a divorce settled, ten years after she first took on the case.

And yesterday we had the news that a new trial in the saga of Stephen Lawrence would start in November.

I doubt I could find more than a handful of people, if any, who thought either of these examples acceptable.

A good project manager would analyse why various jobs took a long time and take action to make sure that the delays were not repeated.

 C often said these long times in divorce were often down to plain vindictiveness on the part of both parties and she would often ponder how they ever stopped rowing long enough to get married. There is even a story, I’ve heard of two barristers, who when they divorced managed to blow all their money on other lawyers. Somehow those that waste time in the divorce system, should be made to pay more, so that those who need help can get it.

With criminal trials it has often puzzled me, how supposedly similar trials take a very much variable time to get to court. This timeline of the Ipswich murders shows how a quite complicated case, was brought to court in just 14 months. Other much less complicated cases take a lot longer to get to court, with all that entails in terms of costs of remand and stress for the witnesses.

We must not cut corners, as quality of justice is paramount, but surely some analysis will lead to ways to improve the speed of the courts.

With all the fuss about Ken Clarke’s comments on rape, it seems to me that emotion has got the better of a decent analysis, which might indicate a few simple procedural changes, that will ensure a less stressful time for the victim and more cases coming to a result where the guilty is rightly convicted.

I remember seeing an article some years ago, where when there was a cot death, one police force tried to send an officer, who had suffered a similar experience.  This simple change to procedure, showed a degree of compassion and care and removed a lot of bad emotion and accusations from the system. In my view it showed how if police respond to an incident properly in the first place they might save a lot of problems later on.  First response seems to be getting better, but I’ve only reported a couple of crimes in my 63 years.  Two were in France and if the French system hasn’t changed, we have nothing to learn there.

To summarise.

1. A project manager calculates the resources they need.
2. They then look at the systems to get each task done in the most efficient way.
3. Analysis is always performed to see if speed and quality can be improved and costs can be better controlled.

In my view, with forty years experience of project mangement, it is getting better as some of the rail projects like the Western Curve at Dalston and the improvements to container routes have been done on time and under budget.

Let’s hope that those who administer the justice system are prepared to learn from management successes elsewhere!

May 19, 2011 - Posted by AnonW | World | Justice, Law, Politics, Project Management