ABSTRACT
It can be a long and troublesome process finding a suitable response. You may be repeatedly disappointed when promising interventions are vetoed because of expense or difficulty, or because a crucial partner won't cooperate. But there is never just one way to solve a problem and it is always possible to find an acceptable response among the available range of situational measures. So, eventually your team will agree on a response that meets some basic requirements:
It is not too ambitious or costly.
It focuses on near, direct causes rather than on distant, more indirect ones, which gives it a good chance of making an immediate impact.
The mechanism through which each measure should impact the problem has been clearly articulated.
So, at last your worries are over and you can relax, right? Wrong! Even more difficult than agreeing on a promising response is to make sure that, once selected, it is actually implemented. As an analyst, you cannot ensure this on your own, but if you know the pitfalls of implementation, you can steer the partnership away from choosing responses that can fall prey to these. Tim Hope and Dan Murphy identified these pitfalls when studying a Home Office vandalism prevention project in eleven schools in Manchester.