“Ah, Bond. HR would like a word”

The latest, much‑delayed film in the 007 franchise is an advert for the value of HR to project leaders. Lesson one? Don’t keep recruiting duff project managers into your project team…

Lots of businesses are reporting staffing problems in the wake of the pandemic. Judging by the travails of the project managers in the latest Bond film, No Time to Die, the issue extends to both international terrorists and the security services. (Needless to say, serious spoilers follow…)

The set‑up: MI6 head honcho M (Ralph Fiennes) is in hot water. He’s been running an off‑the‑books project that has quite literally blown up in his face, resulting in the supervillain Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek) taking control of a DNA‑targeting biological superweapon after erstwhile Bond nemesis Ernst Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) steals it from MI6. These are our three main project managers.

The labours of Heracles

We can be clear at the outset that M’s Project Heracles was a disaster waiting to happen. Let’s look at the evidence. M is an experienced PMO leader. He has clear lines of accountability to his sponsors and the board. And although he obviously requires some licence to operate within established parameters, the least his paymasters can expect is responsible risk management.

What does he do? Recruits Russian scientist Valdo Obruchev (David Dencik) to head the project, who then turns out to be a psycho who’s happy to work secretly for both SPECTRE head Blofeld and the mysterious Safin. Has M ever heard of vetting?

But that’s not even the worst of M’s errors on Project Heracles. Imagine you’ve been assigned – in the strictest secrecy – a project to develop a potentially devastating bioweapon. Where will you base your project? A secret bunker, maybe, which can easily be locked down? Perhaps a remote island, where any potential lab leak can be contained? How about the 25th floor of a central London office block? Yep, that’s the ‘covert’ location M selects.

That’s not all. They’ve woefully underfunded cybersecurity at the installation – USB thumb‑drive access to the database? Really? And you can forget about off‑site back‑up protocols. In short, this is a litany of basic project errors.

Bond on the run

Where’s our hero in all this? Turns out Bond (Daniel Craig) has retired to Jamaica, having been devastated five years earlier by the apparent betrayal of his lover Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux). The couple were holidaying in Italy and stopped to visit the tomb of Bond’s other ‘love of his life’ Vesper Lynd. The tomb promptly blew up – courtesy of Bond’s old nemesis Blofeld, directing his own little revenge project from Belmarsh prison courtesy of a two‑way bionic eye sported by the film’s arch henchman, Primo (Dali Benssalah). Smart project managers know they can and should steal good ideas from other projects – not just your own ‘lessons learned’, but the approaches your rivals employ, too. Pity M didn’t look to Blofeld. Forget Slack: that bionic eye gizmo is precisely the sort of cutting‑edge tech that can supercharge project efficiency.

Except… this being Bond, his own gizmos come into play. It’s very disappointing that Blofeld didn’t remember the bullet‑proof vintage Aston Martin complete with miniguns when he set up the hit. Lessons not learned. And, frankly, he has his own HR issues. Primo’s bomb fails to kill Bond at the tomb. Then despite being massively overmanned (four cars, two motorbikes and a chopper, all full of heavies), Primo still manages to fluff the hit on 007.

Surely Blofeld, his project lead, will take the hint and fire the henchman? Oh, no. He keeps him on the books for five years, eventually trusting him with the office‑block raid. We all know some projects go wrong, and everyone deserves a second chance. But this is just inconsistent people management.

Bond is heartbroken, presumably reports back to MI6 that Madeleine is a wrong ‘un and heads to the Caribbean. Which makes it frankly remarkable that she turns up as… Blofeld’s psychotherapist! Yet more ammunition for HR when it comes to M’s annual review. Projects need the right people in the right places, and he’s clearly ignored her personnel files.

Safin the hot seat

Confused yet? We’ve barely started. CIA chief Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) persuades Bond out of retirement to track down rogue boffin Obruchev. In short order, they discover: (a) he’s going to be at a massive SPECTRE shindig to celebrate Blofeld’s birthday; (b) there’s a new 007 (Nomi, played by Lashana Lynch); (c) Blofeld’s whole plan is to kill Bond with the DNA‑based superweapon (well, bombs and bullets didn’t work); and (d) Primo has screwed up again and the scientist is actually working for Safin. Right under Primo’s nose, Obruchev re‑programmes Heracles to kill the entire SPECTRE high command.

Worse still, Bond himself carries the Heracles nanobots, via Madeleine, to Blofeld, killing him too. Who’s in charge of this project? Bond’s a burnt‑out agent clumsily making the situation worse. Primo is a multiple failure who still, somehow, manages to get hired as lead henchman by the very guy who duped him. Madeleine is clearly the beneficiary of sexist attitudes towards team members considered attractive. The only smart project hire so far is the new 007, who injects not just some much‑needed diversity into the organisation, but is also clearly laser‑focused on project goals, not personal angst or relitigating past relationship breakdowns.

But perhaps the worst project sin on show is Safin’s lack of a clear project goal. We can overlook his poor due diligence in hiring key personnel like Primo. A glance round his missile‑proof remote island lair shows the sheer number of people he’s had to hire, from gun‑toting henchmen to landscape gardeners and weird maintainers of his vast acid pools. It’s a great project lesson: no matter the scale of your staffing needs, don’t let standards slip.

But we never really learn why Safin has gone to all the trouble of stealing a DNA bioweapon in the first place. Sure, at one point, we learn that millions of people would be affected, leading to countless deaths. But why? How is this project going to get signed off? Perhaps he just has a number in mind, but we all know how dangerous it is to have vague project goals – especially when you’re about to release a swarm of deadly self‑replicating nanobots. Just like M, he has no concept of risk assessment.

At least Hugo Drax in Moonraker wanted to wipe out humanity to start all over again with his own seed population. Now that’s a clear project milestone. Made in 1979, it had an arguably better car – the Lotus Esprit submarine – and a better henchman with facial modification. We’ll take Jaws and his, er, jaws over Primo and his spring‑loaded eye any day. And in 2022, ripping up and starting again doesn’t seem anywhere near as psychotic as it did in the 1970s.

 

	M	Blofeld	Safin
Project risk assessment	Gives the bureaucracy of the civil service a bad name. HSE will have him in disciplinaries for years. 2/10	Aiming to kill Bond ought to be low-risk. Gathering all your key staff in one place along with a bioweapon? Not so much. 3/10	Reinforced concrete island lair? Check. Staying one step ahead of Bond? Check. Psyching out his girlfriend 25 years ahead of time? Check. 8/10
Project team and resource management	Shout out to Q for saving the day, as usual. And the new 007 looks the real deal. But blowing all that cash on an off-the-books lab? 5/10	Huge overstaffing of the hits on Bond that fail mean a miss on budgets. Kudos for remote management via bionic eye, though. 6/10	Incredible project ramp-up with a really big team and excellent facilities. Hiring Primo was a dud, but overall… 7/10
Project planning and assessment	Oh dear. When did M think he’d get to deploy Project Heracles? And his control of agents in the field is woeful. 3/10	Running projects for SPECTRE from prison? Impressive. But if your project brings down the entire enterprise? 2/10	Classic boondoggle project: lots of moving parts and achievable stage gates, but no clear objective. There are cheaper ways to commit random genocide. 2/10
Overall score	3/10 Take back the knighthood, ma’am. Then send him for PRINCE2 training.	4/10 Being dead means avoiding the lessons learned meeting on a project that killed the entire board.	6/10 A project lead you can put on the board’s more harebrained schemes that must look good while achieving nothing.

 

Our winner, then, despite poor project goal-setting and an HR-aneurism-inducing lack of appreciation of work-life balance is Lyutsifer Safin. Bond, meanwhile, should be looking for his P45…

 

THIS ARTICLE IS BROUGHT TO YOU FROM THE SPRING 2021 ISSUE OF PROJECT JOURNAL, WHICH IS FREE FOR APM MEMBERS.