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Targets and Street Sweepers

I encountered our new Street Sweeping machine on the Coventry Road in Sheldon today. It had a flat tyre and had been sitting there for about 2 hours.

This shows the problems with managing things through targets and statistics. We don't have a statistic which measures how long it takes the depot to come out and sort out a flat tyre. Common Sense dictates that the depot should move reasonably quickly to sort this out, but Common Sense and the Public Sector don't make easy bed fellows.

There is no sense in having yet another statistic of "how long does it take to fix the street sweeper", but at the same time what is the sense of having the machine in existance if it is merely laid up with a flat tyre.

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