I was utterly stunned as I watched the programme, I appeared to be witnessing the cream of 20000 applicants fail in the most basic of project management tasks. If you create a process you need to errrhh ... test the process, otherwise errmm.... it isn't tested.. and it may not work.

The managers deployed the sets, they had the production rooms ready ( presumably organised by the production team ), they had order forms and cameras, and the software and the printers were all ready to go. So I was then poised to see how each team would test the production process, would they bother with multiple images and attempt to do put them on different mediums ...and I waited. There were some arguments, some messing about with jewellery on Simon's team and a choice of which piece of embarrassing uncut and shapeless curtain material was going to be wrapped around customers, and on the other team Helene wandered around the production room sipping tea in her self-appointed role as head of back room production, presumably organising production.

As time passed I failed to see any production test. Had I missed it ? Had it worked so smoothly that it didn't feature in the edit because it would lack viewer interest? Nope, it hadn't happened. Then trauma, both teams were thrown into utter turmoil by the appearance of an image to process. Awesomely, awesomely bad. The full scale of Helene's preparation became apparent, did it not occur to her that if you are in charge of a production process then you are responsible for something being produced ? Lucinda was an insurmountable problem but a problem that should have been identified. Simon's problems were arguable even worse in one regard, as the images couldn't even be identified, at least he had Alex on the software who was presumably at least as competent as a six year old, but he also had the foulest, ugliest and chaviest team member in Claire who was effectively intent on sabotage. If I had a team member like Claire to deal with I would have been very keen to see her perform her task competently and her failure was the fundamental cause of Simon's failure.

Have none of these people ever been responsible for setting up a system or process of some sort? The problems are mostly generic and have generic solutions ! Now I wouldn't have expected the likes of numbskull eyelash-flicking, neuron-depleted Lindi to be able to cope with such deeply complicated concepts but some of the others were pretty mature and had previously had responsible positions. How was such a basic error possible? What hope is there for these people?

I think some of the candidates were busy setting others up to take the fall rather than do anything so mundane as team work to win the project. To make a project work the participtants must all have the same or very similar aims and must develop a process together to achieve that goal. Unfortunately this years candidates seem to work outside the team towards making others fail so they can blame them.

Hope I made sense

To be fair, going on interviews with past contestants, the teams have a lot of constraints put on them that the viewers aren't told about. If both teams make the same elementary mistake, I think there is fair chance that it was somehow set out of them in the guidelines. Perhaps they were told they couldn't test the system out beforehand?

Though I also agree that nobody still in this year seems to see any benefit in looking like a team player. Which I think is stupid and a real failure to see the 'bigger picture' (sorry for the cliche). OK, they all want to win, but all but one of them won't - the rest will need jobs when they come out of this. Looking like a backstabbing idiot on national TV is going to make it difficult to get most people to want to work with you afterwards. Surely any real 'tycoon of the future' would see that? I feel that Simon, for all his mistakes, was the only one this year who could see that it isn't worth ruining your reputation to be the Apprentice.

I don't recall any sort of testing in any of the series I've seen. I always thought that as they only have about a day or so to complete a task, they just didn't have time for testing but have to jump right in. Possibly it's why the tasks always seem to go so badly?

Success doesn't make good tv...

Imagine one team had sailed through the task with no problems and all of them getting on well = boredom I afraid...

jtnorth ... I agree with you Simon was the only senisble one to see that his reputation was not worth losing over a bunch of sefl centred assholes. I admired him more than I do all the other contestants besides Raef and Jennifer.

But there was plenty of time for them to just do a couple of prints. They basically didn't think to try !

I agree there are a lot of constraints that are not made obvious, the most important one revealed recently was that the teams could not be split into more than two. I have often wondered why individuals were not sent to do various minor tasks and now I know.

I really don't think there would have been a constraint about trying out the process on some test photos. No complaint was ever made by Simon or Lucinda in the programme or by Simon in his post fire interview.

Reason: they are all idiots
I dont know what theyre doing there!
I only watch in the hope that some of them might turn out to be the cream of this years commercial crop