The Challenge and opportunity
The City of Adelaide (CoA) is the local government area of the capital city of South Australia. In 2018 the asset management team recognized a desperate need to modernize — processes and practices were sub-par and true transformation was required.
At the outset the team was under significant pressure to transform its approach:
- An asset management audit revealed that despite best efforts, the City was behind industry standards
- An Organizational Strategic Risk Committee, in line with ISO 31000, identified four extreme and five high-risk areas
- A staff survey found cultural disempowerment
In 2020, the impact of COVID-19 added additional pressures, further amplifying the need for transformation.
There were significant financial impacts, with 60–70% of CoA’s income coming from commercial operations in the city. Subsequently the executive team was tasked with cutting $20M from the operational budget, forcing all spending decisions into the limelight. The internal stakeholder environment was also thrown into flux, with little surety around where accountability fell moving forward.
The approach
While many organizations approach an asset management implementation as part of their day-to-day, CoA was fortunate to be able to treat transformation as a dedicated project, leveraging expert project management engaging specialist firm Chamonix. While key CoA staff continued their essential work, Chamonix specialists in change management, systems alignment and other areas were brought in as required to enable success.
CoA’s approach supported clear strategic planning from the outset, and a commitment to phased measurement. As a result, defined business enablers and community outcomes were delivered efficiently and incrementally, rather than stalling when challenges arose.
The results
In just under 12 months, CoA has achieved significant wins in its transformation:
- Powerful systems integration and alignment: 17 systems refined to 7; accurate, transparent data for all users.
- Workforce empowerment: Mobility improvements connect work crews with CoA’s strategic vision. Deployed over 100 tablets to City of Adelaide operations team.
- Data-driven decision-making: Preliminary modeling outcomes communicate long-term impacts of capital and investment variations.
- Risk management: Organizational risk mitigated and project continues to deliver despite significant COVID-19 challenges.
- Data improvement: Strategic assessment of data requirements to expedite project delivery and improve ongoing collection activity.
In addition, CoA saw many strategic impacts:
- Merging of multiple platforms to an aligned enterprise architecture
- Preliminary lifecycle modeling outcomes enabling more informed decision making
- Significant minimization of financial and audit risk exposure
Finally, the project also made lasting operational impacts:
- Full systems upgrade to support ongoing processing and reporting requirements
- Manual and ad-hoc processing via spreadsheets eliminated
- Disparate and inconsistent asset registers merged
- Alignment of operating processes with strategic decision-making, thanks to improved staff knowledge- transfer and training
- Shift from age-based to condition-based renewals
- Shift from reactive to planned maintenance
- Closed customer complaint feedback loop, visible to all stakeholders
The right partnership
CoA partnered with Brightly — later acquired by Siemens — on its asset management transformation program in late 2019, to further improve its approach to sustainable infrastructure management. “This was about transformation for the City of Adelaide, rather than just an asset system rollout — we were looking for an organization we could work with as partners. Brightly offers the specialist knowledge to understand our problem and provide a solution that was more than just a system,” says Koekemoer.
Thanks to the strategic approach of this transformation, the behemoth challenges of 2020 remained manageable, minimizing decision paralysis and helping to ensure community service level improvements continued to be delivered. New processes and systems provide the ability to see future choices, and levers to alter what CoA’s future will look like for the better of the organization and the community.