Projects Instead of Decisions: Why Reforms Add to the Burden Rather Than Relieving It

Every new project is meant to bring relief. In practice, the opposite tends to happen: public authorities pile initiative on top of initiative, and not a single old task ever falls away.

Anyone leading a public authority today knows the pattern. A digitalisation project is running, alongside an organisational project, a process optimisation programme, and another one on leadership development. Each individual initiative is well justified. Taken together, though, they do not produce relief. They add another layer of work on top of an already full workload in day-to-day administrative work.

A system that only adds tasks

The overload affecting so many public authorities is not the result of individual poor decisions, nor is it a consequence of weak leadership. It is structural. Task volumes keep growing, standards become denser, expectations from politics and the public keep rising, while staff, time and budget remain limited. What stands out is less the individual burden than its permanence. What began years ago as a temporary special task is now routine business, while new special tasks have long since been added on top.

Into this system, reforms are typically launched as projects. A project has a start, a timetable, a closing report. This form is precisely what makes it politically and organisationally acceptable: it can be reported on, it can be scheduled, it produces visible activity. What a project structurally fails to deliver is a reduction of something that already exists. A project adds. It almost never decides what will no longer be done in future.

Why projects replace decisions instead of making them

Real relief comes not from another initiative but from a decision: this task falls away, that standard is lowered, this responsibility is merged with another. Such decisions are uncomfortable, because they mean giving something up, and someone has to be accountable for the consequences. A project sidesteps this discomfort. It promises improvement without taking anything away from anyone. This is precisely why projects get launched where decisions are actually overdue.

The result is a pattern that repeats across many local authorities and public bodies: a well-intentioned efficiency initiative is set up, it ties up project leadership, a steering group and various departments, it produces reports, workshops and coordination meetings, and at the end there is a concept that generates further implementation work. The original burden remains, because nobody decided what to give up. Instead, a new burden has been added: the project itself.

How this plays out in everyday work

In practice, it usually goes like this. A department has been reporting overload for months. The response from the leadership level is a project brief: a concept for relief is to be developed. That immediately ties up further resources, because a concept does not write itself. It needs project leadership, coordination meetings with the departments involved, a steering group tracking progress, and eventually a report that in turn has to be read, commented on and presented to committees. All of this activity comes on top of the actual departmental work. It does not replace it.

Once the concept is finished, it typically contains measures that introduce additional standards, additional documentation requirements or additional coordination steps, because that is the kind of proposal that reads well in a project report. The question of which existing task falls away in return, or which existing standard is lowered, rarely appears in such concepts. Answering it would mean someone at leadership level naming a concrete priority and taking responsibility for the trade-off. A project report cannot do that, because by definition it delivers recommendations, not decisions.

The overload loop as a recurring cycle

This pattern repeats because it reinforces itself. Rising pressure creates calls for reform. Reform gets organised as a project, because that is the more acceptable form. The project ties up additional capacity without reducing existing tasks. Overall pressure keeps rising. The next call for reform follows, often before the previous project has even been completed. The result is a cycle that looks from the outside like a genuine appetite for reform, but is in fact an avoidance strategy: a great deal of activity to avoid taking the one decision that would actually bring relief.

Anyone who wants to break this cycle needs to understand efficiency differently from how many reform programmes treat it. Efficiency is not a cost-cutting instrument, nor a technical optimisation problem that can be solved with another project. Efficiency is a leadership and steering decision about which tasks a public authority still wants and is able to deliver, and at what level of quality. That decision cannot be delegated to a project group. It belongs with those who lead the organisation.

What this means for your own authority

For senior managers, this leads to a sober test question before any new initiative: what falls away once this project begins? If that question cannot be answered, the initiative is probably just another layer on an already overloaded system, not a solution. Anyone approving a project should at the same time determine which task, which standard, or which coordination loop falls away in return. Without that determination, it is entirely predictable that the project will end with one more task added, and not a single one removed.

Asking this question consistently, before another programme is set up, is uncomfortable. It requires leaders to name priorities openly and state trade-offs plainly, rather than hiding them inside a concept. But it is the only way out of a cycle that otherwise tightens a little further with every well-intentioned project.

This is exactly where my book Effiziente Verwaltung (Efficient public administration) begins. Chapter 1 maps out the overload loop before any solutions are discussed, because anyone who does not understand its structural causes will keep approaching every further reform initiative as a project rather than as a decision.