1. Poor planning.
2. Inbuilt but unmeasurable inefficiencies.
3. De-motivation of staff.
4. Management.
Poor planning
Planning using complex systems like georoute and the IWT takes a great deal of knowledge of both the system and the job you are planning,the planners i have met have little knowledge of either,not entirely their fault because the were not chosen for their planning experience but shoe-horned into a job with very little training which they were ill-equipped for....another example of RM trying to do things on the cheap and wasting a fortune in the process.
Inbuilt but unmeasurable inefficiencies.
You can plan for a lot of things but you can't plan for a set of temporary traffic lights,a customer who can't find their keys,your partner being a bit slower,a missed packet,a queue in the shop,people asking for directions,the list is endless...all of these inefficiencies are doubled under park&loop.
All it takes is 5mins a loop and after 6 40min loops you're half an hour behind...and half an hour in park&loop money is an hour.
De-motivation of staff.
If you have your own walk you are rightly or wrongly motivated to complete it,if something holds you up for 5 mins you will in most cases attempt to make that time up,sometimes it's just a sub-concious thing but you will.
Under Park&Loop,especially with an unachievable starting point there is absolutely no motivation to do anything other than work at an acceptable pace...why would you?
Management.
Management's answer to failure as always is to blame the staff,it's the biggest mistake you can make as a manager even when it is true,it's on page 1 of "management for idiots" and they still do it.
If you introduce change and you want it to work you have to engage the workforce.they,unfortunately have struggled to engage their brains.
Management have always,still are and probably always will be the weakest link in Royal Mail.
I would also say that i don't think Georoute was ever really suited to the kind of planning involved in this kind of job,i think RM were sold a pig in a poke with that one.
Nothing new there.
That's my take on why it's such a balls up wherever it's gone,there are other reasons like poor help,training and support for our reps from our side but it was never going to be pretty if all you have to work with is crap.
So how can it get things so wrong ?
BUT thats when to talk of flexing came up.