Irrespective of winning and losing, one established fact about Pakistan cricket is its unpredictability. With the recent T20 debacle against Sri Lanka’s B team, the Pakistani squad again showed shocking inconsistency. If we look at the Pakistan team’s performance after the World Cup, overall we did better than what our current One-Day International (ODI) ranking indicates. However, our two worst performances came against the two worst-placed teams in the tournament.
Against the West Indies in the World Cup, we dug a big hole for ourselves which eventually cost us a place in the semi-finals. Against Afghanistan, Pakistan should have won the game easily. Instead, we were hardly able to squeeze through a win. On the other hand, Pakistan was the only non-qualifying team that had defeated both finalists. This is the inconsistency everyone talks about.
In ODI and Test rankings, Pakistan has been in the mid-tier for decades. We all wish the team consistently plays good cricket and stays competitive with top tier teams, but the question is: why are we not there? Is this a coincidence? My answer to that question is no, you cannot be consistently inconsistent for decades just by coincidence.
‘Inconsistent’ is the adjective that has most often been attached to Pakistan’s cricket teams over the years. It’s about time Pakistan cricket move into the modern age and take data-driven decisions
With the huge influx of money nowadays, cricket has become an industry, and like any other industry, if your growth is stalled, you should seriously look at your operational methods and processes to find the real root cause. You can’t run affairs the same way and expect results which are associated with better performing competitors. Similar to how you can’t get the same performance from a 20-year-old car compared to a brand new car, you can’t get similar results against teams that have been employing modern management techniques. To successfully run an industry, you need experienced management.
Similarly, cricket in Pakistan also needs a highly experienced multi-skill professional management team. A majority of well-run organisations all over the world employ the Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control (DMAIC) technique or some other techniques to understand the real issues.
So what is DMAIC? This technique could be used to identify and improve any type of operational issues. The DMAIC process is generally led by an independent, well-trained professional or group of professionals whose job is to purely rely on data and to provide the feedback to relevant stakeholders in order to take data-driven actions and continue doing so until the agreed goals are met. Once you meet the goals, then a control needs to be placed for sustained performance so that you don’t fall back to the previous state. This is an ongoing process which helps organisations steadily improve performance by starting a new cycle of improvement. For that reason, the process is often called the ‘continuous improvement’ process.
This whole process is a science. In an industrial set-up it is called ‘operation excellence’ which is led by a subject matter expert. That expert must have experience in performing methodical root cause analysis and come up with a corrective action plan for short term and long term improvement in each area of concern.
One of the first tasks of that operation excellence team would be to benchmark the current performance in various areas of cricketing operations. This you may want to call the current state. The next step would be to decide where you want to be in the next one, three, five and 10 years. This you may want to call ‘future state’. Based on that, the operation excellence team will perform gap analysis, and the next step would be to create a road map or action plan to close the gap with monthly or bi-monthly targets to track and gauge the progress.