When my colleagues arrive late at work, spluttering with fury over the failings of London Underground's Northern Line, some of them direct their venom at me. Why am I responsible for the failures that leave them fuming on platforms or sweating in tunnels? Because two-and-a-half years ago I wrote an article about how much the Northern Line had improved - and it has gone downhill ever since.
When I wrote about the Northern Line, it was an almost flawless service. Its reputation as the Underground's "misery line" was long out of date. I had, at that point, been using the Northern Line twice daily for 11 years - more than 5,000 journeys. Strike days apart, I doubt I had suffered more than 11 serious delays in all that time.
This year is a different story. There are regular hold-ups and disruptions. To many users, the reason is obvious. What happened was not that I jinxed the line by praising it, but that Tony Blair's government imposed a hugely complicated new management structure on the Underground, giving the task of maintaining and upgrading the tracks, signals and trains to two private sector consortia, leaving the old railway management with the hugely reduced job of managing the drivers and the station staff.
Many critics, including this newspaper, saw this set-up as too complex, leaving it unclear where management responsibility lay. When I spent a day with the Northern Line management and train drivers in 2002, before the new structure was imposed, I was enormously impressed by their commitment. It was also clear that they were working with an antiquated signalling system which they kept running through knowledge of its every quirk. Had the transfer of the system to a new company and new management led to the deterioration in the service?
Now, I appreciate that if you are reading this in Seattle or Stuttgart or Seoul, you may not be riveted by the details of my daily commute. But at the heart of the Northern Line's problems lies a wider question, one of particular significance in this age of outsourcing: what happens when, in the interests of lower costs or greater efficiency, you rip up long-established ways of operating? Is deteriorating customer service the inevitable accompaniment to the contracting out of what was formerly done in-house?
There is certainly evidence that managers who try outsourcing do regret it. In a worldwide Gallup survey, conducted for Proudfoot Consulting and published last week, more than one third of managers said outsourcing had either delivered less than expected or had been a complete failure. A study by PA Consulting in 2002 found even more disenchantment: that two-thirds of companies were disappointed.
Is the Northern Line an example of such failure? In search of answers, I spent Monday travelling half-way across London. First, I met the senior management of London Underground, the people who now control the staff, but not the track, signals or trains, in their headquarters at St James's Park station.
Then I went to Canary Wharf to meet some of the top management at Tube Lines - the consortium of Bechtel of the US, Jarvis of the UK and Spanish-owned Amey - who are responsible for maintaining the infrastructure of three of the lines: the Northern, Jubilee and Piccadilly.
At my first meeting, with the London Underground managers, I was struck by how much they love their railway. Mike Brown, the Underground's chief operating officer, and the two senior colleagues who joined us, have, between them, 57 years of experience on the Underground. They know every inch of it - and the new set-up is clearly deeply frustrating to them.
First, they gave Tube Lines some credit. The Jubilee and Piccadilly lines have improved since it took over. But my perception of the Northern Line is correct: its reliability has deteriorated under Tube Lines. The service was badly disrupted by a derailment last year which all sides agree was not the fault of the new management system but of an old design flaw in a track component. But those decrepit signals are failing more often. Mr Brown says the reason is not that all that Northern Line knowledge has been lost; many of the old staff transferred to Tube Lines. But some of the senior managers are new, and they did not appreciate the dedicated maintenance and housekeeping the Northern Line needed.
Added to that, management of the system is now divided between London Underground and Tube Lines. The two sides have a conference call every morning, but they are no longer in the same building. There are financial incentives for Tube Lines to reduce delays, but Mr Brown says: "I am not sure there's compelling evidence that their behaviours are driven (by those) incentives." As to whether the government-imposed system can work, Mr Brown says: "For me, the jury is definitely still out."
Over at Tube Lines, managers naturally resist the idea that the Northern Line's deterioration can be blamed either on them or the new set-up. Lee Jones, Tube Lines infrastructure manager for the Northern Line, says the system's age meant that it would have become less reliable whoever was running it. He says he and his managerial colleagues have relied on the knowledge of the 2,500 London Underground workers who were transferred to Tube Lines.
But Mr Jones and Stephen Peat, Tube Lines operations director, while experienced railway managers, are relatively new to the Underground. Mr Peat accepts Mr Brown's view that Tube Lines has found the Northern Line harder than it expected. What are the lessons for organisations spinning off parts of their operation to third parties? It may work; it may not. It may make sense on paper, but it is fraught with risk. You may be destroying ways of working that have held your operations together. As for the Northern Line, Tube Lines is promising a new signalling system by 2011. That means seven more years of harsh words from my colleagues.
