managed failure

I hired someone about a few years ago who turned out to not have the skills and abilities I thought they did. But as my dear readers know, that does not mean they got fired. The amount of change we've been through operationally - new mandate, new jobs with new roles and responsibilities, new org structure - means that he has been able to bounce from project to project, delivering sub-par efforts with stellar consistency. I gave this person a "meets with some exceptions" review in June, but it had no effect on their employment. So now I'm devising a way to get them fired - creating a project for them that they can fail in in a public and documentable way without incurring any risk to my project. I feel creepy.