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Sydney Water, Lendlease and John Holland
The ‘Enable and Optimise’ project is a typical complex adaptive organisational change project with people and performance at its heart. The project entailed the development and implementation of a bespoke management operating system (MOS), operating model and optimised asset- creation-process with enhanced complexity tool to streamline and safeguard delivery.
Project Brief
Delivery Management (DM), the infrastructure arm of Sydney Water, deliver 1500+ infrastructure projects annually to provide the lifestream for a fast-growing community. DM is a consortium between Sydney Water, Lendlease and John Holland.
In 2017-2018, DM implemented several business improvement initiatives to mature infrastructure delivery and organisational leadership capability to serve the current and future water needs of the community.
The ‘Enable and Optimise’ project is a typical complex adaptive organisational change project with people and performance at its heart. The project entailed the development and implementation of a bespoke management operating system (MOS), operating model and optimised asset-creation-process with enhanced complexity tool to streamline and safeguard delivery.
The project sought to improve leadership capability, business performance across all key performance indicators (KPIs) and capital results. 10 – 15% efficiency was targeted.
The innovative change strategy leveraged ADKAR and the ground-breaking 70-20-10 learning model by combining training, on-the-job coaching and interactive gamified project simulations to target three-cohorts and 200 resources. Regular communication, feedback loops and stakeholder empowerment mechanisms were critical change levers.
Drawing on market-leading stratum theory, the MOS enhances agility by prescribing strategic planning/ delivery horizons based on leadership levels and embedding continual improvement cycles and panoramic performance measurement.
Contribution
The ‘Enable and Optimise’ project matured infrastructure delivery and leadership capability in DM by unlocking the value of the MOS, operating model and process-mapping tool. Effective change management is showcased in the following pulse-checks:
100% of respondents in the post- implementation learner survey confirmed they are applying the new tools.
More recent surveys indicate that 96% of target employees understand the MOS.
Helix analytics show a whopping 630% increase in logons from 2018 to 2019.
The goals of enhanced business performance and capital results have been indisputably realised with:
All seven KPI’s showing trending growth from 2016/17. For example, safety and community/society metrics have improved by +12% and +11% respectively.
The capital program expanded by 52% from mid-2017 to mid-2019, with minimal resource increases.
Sydney Water has since been recognised as an exemplar capital delivery program by the Major Projects Association in the UK in 2018, paving the way for utilities in Australia and benefiting staff, suppliers, NSW Government, industry and the community.
The corporate strategy for world class performance, a high performing culture and the customer at the centre will continue to drive business transformation and enabled by the strategic leadership and quality management cycles embedded in the MOS.
Challenges & Lessons Learned
Bringing a process framework to life in an interactive, engaging and relevant manner is no easy feat. But this challenge was crucial to positively engage staff in the organisational change. Gamification experts, Elemental Projects, were engaged to design and deliver two high- impact project simulations that would embed the MOS to bridge theory-based learning and work-based application.
The fantastic game settings were inspired by medieval times (‘Game of Moans’) and the French revolution (‘Le Brouhaha’) respectively. Both incorporated processes and tools from the MOS such as agile planning and delivery cycles, data- driven performance measurement, quality controls and visualisation tools. Both combined technical training with soft skill development using gamification techniques. Participant feedback was exceptionally positive and demonstrated how innovation can effectively drive change. One participant said,
“A very different way to introduce the MOS. I’d never appreciated quite how fundamentally important such a system is”.
83% of learner survey respondents agreed that the games had increased their confidence in dealing with challenging situations as a leader.
The process-mapping optimisation work that informed the upgraded Helix tool was technically complex and highly challenging. 12+ workshops were required and 30+ subject matters experts were engaged in the process.
Lessons learned were proactively captured throughout the project as is standard practice at Sydney Water. One critical lesson came out of stakeholder feedback. The lesson was that uptake and benefits realisation was impeded due to the haphazard way that leaders were storing and accessing MOS records. This practice was diminishing morale and gave upper management limited visibility of MOS activity by frontline managers. As such the decision was taken to develop a standardised MOS ecosystem to house all key documentation. This enhancement was added to the projects scope via integrated change control and it successfully filled the capability gap to the benefit of all stakeholders.
Projects in the Organisation
Sydney Water is at the forefront of responding to rapid population growth as it builds Sydney. With a capital works budget of over $820 million for this year, Sydney Water leverages innovative solutions to create sustainable, liveable cities of tomorrow for the community.
Work has commenced on a 30-year infrastructure investment plan, which designs solutions to provide quality water services to ever-expanding cities.
Sydney Water is currently transitioning from a traditional design-and-construct delivery model to Partnering-for-Success (P4S) for the next evolution of our capital infrastructure delivery framework. P4S is a once in a generation organisation transformation of the business, enabled by partnering with three Regional Delivery Consortia for 10-years, to deliver enhanced outcomes to all stakeholders including partners and the community. The model is underpinned by world class contract management, using NEC4 contracts, and is all about integration, consistency and value.
Delivering an infrastructure program of this size requires the best of the best to ensure projects deliver their customer outcomes on time, every time.
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