Australia

The Client

MACA is a publicly listed international contracting group providing services to the Australian and Asian mining and construction industries. Headquartered in Western Australia, MACA operates in a fast-moving and highly sophisticated industry and is always looking for ways to ensure its operations are optimised.

The Ask

MACA’s significant business divisions are focused on core mining contracting services, alongside civil and infrastructure works. These sectors have been experiencing rapid growth and high activity, fuelled by increased infrastructure spending during the pandemic and the need to keep the economy moving throughout this period. As a result of the increased demand for its services, MACA identified the need for the right technology to support its growth, and that could be leveraged across the organisation, quickly, and at scale. Sia Partners was engaged to work with MACA’s business divisions to build a pragmatic and implementable strategy and architecture to revamp the availability of technology across the business divisions.

Our Approach

Working closely with stakeholders from each of the business divisions, we focused on applying a strong strategic lens to MACA’s cross-functional technological needs to ensure all decisions were fit for the long term. We helped MACA to formulate and achieve its vision to enable sustainable business growth and expansion in a simple, integrated and secure way, supported by fit-for-purpose solutions.

Our process included:

Discovery

• Reviewing MACA’s organisation strategic direction and vision to understand business growth aspirations and key focus areas
• Reviewing the current-state technology architecture to understand current-state challenges and technology maturity

Strategic Intent

• Working with executive stakeholders to define guiding principles for future-state design and definition of the technology strategy
• Identifying key areas of opportunities to build a technology foundation, with a focus on people, assets, and operational productivity
• Articulating and assessing the recommendations to improve the usage of data, analytics and enabling operating model considerations

Transition Plan

• Assessing operational requirements to identify front-office and back-office employee journeys and how these may change
• Establishing a clear view of the architectural landscape for the future and transitioning architectures to modernise over time
• Establishing a program structure and detailed cost-benefit assessment to identify the investment roadmap and governance structure guiding implementation

Execution Program

• We partnered with MACA to deliver a program of prioritised initiatives to deliver the strategic outcomes
• Augmenting the internal team with strong program governance, change management, independent solution architecture and vendor selection, business analysis and implementation services.

The Outcome

The exercise provided MACA with a clear plan and targeted architecture to build a contemporary, fit-for-purpose, and agile platform to support the cross-functional needs of the business, and improve operations. Through this engagement, MACA was able to maximise the adoption of strategic enterprise-wide platforms, increase the speed of digitisation of front-line operations, align the organisation and deliver maximum value from their technology investments.

Due diligence to support the expansion of operations through the acquisition

With the mining industry enjoying a strong period of growth, we assisted our mining client to supercharge its organic growth through a targeted merger and acquisition.

The Client

Our client, a large international mining contractor, wanted to support their mandate for growth by expanding their operations through the acquisition of a competitor. With multiple businesses and operations across four continents, the strategic acquisition would add new capability, significantly grow market share in the Australian market and take the business in a new strategic direction. Churchill was engaged when management recognised it needed expert help with the task of evaluating the opportunity.

The Ask 

Our client needed to effectively assess the quality of the target’s operations, sales pipeline, management team, and systems, while simultaneously agreeing on a valuation that accounted for synergies and integration costs. Adding to the complexity, upcoming public reporting commitments meant the acquisition due diligence exercise needed to be completed in a fraction of the normal time frame.

Our Approach

We leveraged our Post-Merger Integration playbook and years of experience managing integrations for large and complex organisations to deliver robust due diligence, all in a matter of weeks. Due to the time restrictions, a Churchill team was rapidly mobilised to run the program management office (PMO) for the due diligence exercise, quantify synergies and develop an integration plan for the combined entities. Our approach was to bolster the management team with skilled resources to deliver an exceptional outcome and included the facilitation of more than 40 governance meetings with workstream leads, third-party advisors, client executives, and Board members. Churchill supported multiple workstreams including Operational assessment; Finance & Tax assessment; Legal and Insurance assessment; Funding options, Integration & Synergies, Communications, and Valuation. Our PMO team partnered with our client across the project and with workstream owners to develop workstream plans and identify cross-dependencies. With synergy and integration cost estimates significant drivers of the overall valuation, Churchill applied our playbook to develop bottom-up synergy and integration estimates and compare them to other similarly sized integrations.

The Outcome

Following our compressed five-week due diligence exercise, the client submitted a successful offer to the target entity, with recognised synergies across Corporate Overheads, Financial & Capital, Operational, and Revenue Opportunities. The due diligence also delivered a detailed 15-month integration plan that included 550+ task integrations across communications and branding, organisational structure, technology change, people impacts, legal entity, insurance integration, and more. The organisation has since successfully leveraged the new acquisition to grow its market share during a time of industry growth.

When a mining services company looked to double its growth over a short time frame, Sia Partners was engaged to help the client work out how.

The Client

A medium-sized mining services manufacturing company based in Perth and servicing the Western Australia Load & Haul market developed an ambitious target to double its growth in three years, moving into different geographical markets, and finding new avenues for product growth.

The Ask 

While the client had ambitious growth targets, it did not have the detail as to how to achieve these targets. Sia Partners (formerly Churchill) was engaged to work with the client and develop this growth strategy, including realistic growth markets, geographies, and product/services.

Our Approach

Sia Partners engaged the client through a series of board and management interviews to understand the guardrails of possible growth options, including lessons learned from previous expansion plans.

We then undertook a strategic landscape review, including macroeconomic impacts on both supply and demand, potential product adjacencies, ability and appetite for geographic expansion as well as competitor assessment and addressable market sizing exercises. 

A series of workshops, involving senior and operational management, were used to explore these opportunities across a traditional Ansoff Matrix:

1. Deeper penetration – how can we supply more existing products/services to existing customers?
2. Expand distribution - how can we gain new customers with existing products/services?
3. Product/Service adjacencies - what new products/services could we supply existing customers?
4. Market development – what new products/services could we supply new customers?

These key themes were explored by product/service and distribution teams to identify and quantify possible opportunities.  These opportunities were then assessed and prioritized against the ability to execute.  Real-time scenario modeling was then undertaken to ensure accurate, pragmatic market share assumptions and outcomes could be reviewed in real-time and validated before being adopted.

The Outcome

The output of this work was the development of a clear growth strategy, with several adjacent markets identified where the client could serve. This resulted in a sizable new client being contracted.  

The client also moved to new premises with new robotic manufacturing processes to ensure scalability and to further capitalize on an expansionary, profitable, sustainable growth trajectory.

The Client

Western Australia’s major electricity network operator, responsible for building, maintaining, and operating an electricity network that powers the lives of 2.3 million people, in the southwest of Western Australia.

The Ask

As a result of major shifts in strategic context, arising from West Australia’s energy transition, a newly established 10-year corporate strategic direction reset, and significant augmentations to the operating structure of the organisation, Sia Partners was engaged to facilitate a fast-paced, integrated Business Unit Planning process across all of the client’s seven Business Units. The primary objective was to cascade the corporate strategy into the Business Units into relevant, actionable and achievable plans, whilst considering the implications on and dependencies with other Business Units.

Our Approach

A rapid 8-week planning and portfolio prioritisation process was developed by Strategy and Business Improvement teams to maximise buy-in from all areas of the business and build ownership of the problems facing the organisation, while also limiting disruption to BAU.

Focussed on delivering two major outcomes: firstly individual business unit planning across all seven business units, followed by integrated whole-of-business planning

We broke this approach into 3 phases: Frame, Develop, & Validate

• Frame: Engagement-focused workshops and initiative planning sessions facilitated with the Senior Leadership team, and for each business unit, to identify key outcomes throughout the business.
• Develop: In-depth analysis of the collected data to identify key risks and opportunities while building out each individual business unit focused on executing the wider business needs.
• Validate: Informed evaluation of the complete scope of business-wide initiatives enabling a comprehensive mapping of priority business activities against key outcomes during the compilation of a whole-of-business 3-year roadmap.

The Outcome

• A robust and actionable 3-year business plan established for each business unit, enabling execution and functional level planning to occur.
• A complete whole-of-business integrated plan for overall monitoring and execution excellence.
• Identification of key decisions, actions and next steps required to progress into the next stage.
• A series of accompanying documents to support the client’s strategy team to monitor and measure performance.
• Strong buy-in from the Senior Leadership Team on the ten-year strategy and 3-year integrated plan and business-wide clarity on what the areas of focus are. 

Sia Partners worked with Western Australia's (WA) major port to identify a new purpose to set their future direction.

The Client

The Fremantle Ports Authority is responsible for managing the Port of Fremantle and the Kwinana Bulk Terminal, one of the key ports in WA for export and trade into Australia. 

The Ask 

Container trade is currently the largest source of revenue for the Port. With the state government considering options around the future of container trade in WA, including potentially transferring it to a new purpose-built facility further south, the Fremantle Ports Authority (Fremantle Ports) found itself facing an uncertain future. Recognising a new approach was needed for the future, the organisation underwent an extensive renewal, with new appointments to the Board and Executive team. Sia Partners was engaged and asked Churchill to facilitate the development of a new strategy to take the organisation into the future, including identifying Fremantle Ports’ purpose.

Our Approach

Our first task was to help Fremantle Ports reframe its purpose to guide it into the future, and bring its key stakeholders on the change journey.

We were able to facilitate this by posing three questions:

1. Who do you serve, and what do those stakeholders want?
2. How do you contribute to those you serve?
3. What is the impact of your contribution?

The answers to these questions aided the development of a new, action-oriented purpose statement for the organisation that set the direction for the organisation into the future.

That action-orientated purpose had two elements:

• A contribution that articulated the actions that serve the highest needs of Fremantle Ports’ most important stakeholders.
• An impact that described how those stakeholders benefit from that contribution. 

Our approach and process for including and managing the stakeholders in the strategic reset included:

• Direct engagement with Fremantle Ports stakeholders (customers, partners, people, stakeholders, importers, and exporters) and global port leaders to identify current and future needs and how leading ports are evolving to better serve their stakeholders.
• Bringing the Fremantle Ports Board and Executive team together to identify key stakeholders, and how to meet their needs.
• Facilitating group discussions to identify the actions Fremantle Ports delivers to support its stakeholders and the benefits that stakeholders experience.

The Outcome 

Fremantle Ports successfully engaged with its stakeholders and its reason for operation and direction for the future. The collaborative work that went into developing the purpose had several beneficial outcomes including:

• Aligning the Fremantle Ports Board and ELT on what its stakeholders want and need, and how Fremantle Ports delivers on these. 
• Stronger relationships with direct and indirect customers, commercial partners, and value chain partners, leading to greater acceptance as WA’s supply chain manager.
• Building a reference point to support decision-making for future strategic work and executions.
• Establishing a strong foundation to refresh Fremantle Ports’ culture and values and provide clarity and direction for employees.

The Client

A government-owned energy utility operating one of the world’s largest infrastructure networks in the southwest of Western Australia. It is responsible for building, maintaining, and operating an electricity network that powers the lives of 2.3 million people.

The Ask 

In 2021, the client developed a 10-year corporate strategy focused on ‘powering the lives of the community', ensuring customers would benefit from safe and reliable energy well into the future. The strategy outlined an evolution to a modular grid that would support the decarbonisation of WA’s local economy while supporting jobs and growth. We were approached by the client’s largest business unit, Asset Operations, which needed a new business plan to fulfill the corporate strategy and tackle the challenges of the energy transition. Sia Partners was engaged to drive the development of a three-year plan (FY 23/25). Advice and support were also sought to manage implementation, including change management, communication, and the effective mobilisation of internal capabilities.

Our Approach

We ran three phases of work: Discovery; Planning; and Pre-Delivery in partnership with the Operations Improvement team.

• Discovery: Focused on building a clear picture of the current situation of the business unit and its functions, framing the coming challenges and opportunities. We included interviewed executives and senior leaders on business priorities and surveyed 40% of the Asset Operations workforce to assess front-line issues and potential solutions. This led to a redefinition of the business unit vision and the role Asset Operations played in changing the network and what was required to deliver on it.
• Planning: Defined a three-year business unit plan for Asset Operations, aligned to the utility’s goals. A co-creation approach was taken, leveraging Sia’s proven business planning frameworks with a design-thinking methodology across both the Asset Operations Leadership Team and functional leaders. The resulting plan included goals and 20 strategic initiatives to ensure the client could operationalise and scale future capabilities and enable efficiencies in developing, maintaining, and operating the future electricity network, supported by an inclusive workplace culture.
• Pre-Delivery: Established robust foundations to drive the successful execution of the 3-year plan from FY23. We provided hands-on support for implementation, including the launch and communication of the plan to the wider organisation and developing a compelling change narrative. including the mobilisation of internal teams and capabilities, detailed scoping and prioritisation of 20 strategic initiatives, refreshing the change management and communication framework, and creating a performance management and reporting framework to monitor the value delivered.

The Outcome

The Asset Operations 3-year business plan kicked off in July 2022 and is running as planned. The governance structure developed is successfully guiding the team, and a select number of strategic initiatives have already been accelerated and strategic initiatives requiring minor expenditures have progressed to delivery, with other initiatives undertaking enterprise-wide portfolio prioritisation and capital allocation to proceed to delivery.

When Australia’s largest agricultural co-operative wanted to ensure its governance arrangements were fit for purpose, Sia Partners was engaged to guide the review process.

The Client

CBH Group is Australia’s largest cooperative organisation having generated revenue of $4.19 billion and $5 billion in assets in 2019. It is owned by approximately 3,900 Western Australian grain-growing businesses. Since its establishment in 1933, CBH’s core purpose has been to sustainably create and return value to its grower members.

The Ask

To ensure that the CBH’s Board governance arrangements remained fit for purpose and aligned to CBH strategy and contemporary best practices, the cooperative embarked on a major Board Governance Review. The Governance Review also needed to improve the engagement of growers and to ensure that recommendations were informed by their opinions. Sia Partners (formally Churchill) was engaged to conduct the Governance Review, including assisting the Board in designing and implementing a clear roadmap of key governance changes.

Our Approach

We designed the Board Governance Review for CBH based on key success factors of strong Board commitment and alignment, as well as education and communication of members. Through structured interviews with the Board and Executives, interviews with peer co-operative from around the world, and research into governance best practices, we developed facts and insights to inform our recommendations on governance changes. These facts supported the recommendations that were agreed upon with the Board and ultimately brought to members for their input. Both quantitative and qualitative sentiments from members were used to gauge the appetite for change as well as preferences for the design of specific changes.

Our team planned a series of workshops and focus groups with the Board, members, and other stakeholders to maintain clear and transparent communications, building strong working relationships to manage divergent options and views. In addition, we worked closely with the Steering Committee and Sponsors to construct change options and carefully plan communications messaging and activities, particularly for areas that were more complex or would result in greater impacts on directors and the member base.

The Outcome

The result of the review was a strong Board consensus on significant changes to policies, rules, and practices covering aspects of candidate nominations and elections, director term and tenure, board size and composition, and board diversity. Through the engagement process, governance changes proposed were aligned to grower sentiment, and several changes required final support from members at a subsequent annual general meeting.

With a member-based financial services organisation looking to invest in its Digital Platforms, Sia Partners was bought in to ensure the project enabled scale and value.

The Client

Capricorn Society is a 45-year-old membership cooperative providing finance, travel and business protection services, and other services to its members, trading on their collective power to get better outcomes.

The Ask

Capricorn Society wanted to make a significant investment in operationalising and maximising the value of its investments in Digital Platforms. Sia Partners (formally Churchill) was asked to support Capricorn by designing a blueprint for adopting agile as an operational model at scale, across its member value streams such as member communications and member loyalty.

Our Approach

Working closely with stakeholders and the digital, IT, and other teams, we:

• Identified opportunities where a product centric delivery model would offer greater agility and have the potential to commence in the near term. 
• Recommended an alternative delivery model blueprint incorporating organisation groupings and disciplines and reviewed capabilities against the current state. 
• Tested and validated the blueprint, highlighting implications and adaptation of how the model would perform across the value chain from idea, demand, and delivery stages. 
• Outlined the requirements on processes, people, and technology to mature capabilities. 
• Defined actions and initiatives to mitigate and overcome challenges in implementing the new model.

The Outcome

• Defined an alternative ‘product-centric’ operating model for the design and delivery of business outcomes, inclusive of capabilities required internally and externally. 
• Established a fit-for-purpose delivery model that combined disciplines from multiple disparate siloed functions across the organisation. 

Sia Partners assisted a large chain of privately owned hospitals in Australia to develop a digital transformation operating model, execute their digital strategy, and set them up for long-term success. 

The Client

With hospitals and clinics across Australia, St John of God Health Care is one of the largest privately owned health and allied services in Australia.

The Ask

St John of God Health Care was undergoing reorganisation to address gaps within the enabling functions of the business. It wanted to improve its digital maturity and capabilities to support the future business model and industry opportunities. Sia Partners was asked to assist in designing a revised Digital & Technology function that would play an important role in supporting the current and future organisation strategy, and providing an end-to-end capability for business transformation. A business case was required to validate the use of significant resources over a number of years, and that would substantially improve their operations.

Our Approach

In order to ensure St John of God was taking the right approach to its digital transformation, we took a thorough and staged approach to assessing both the current state and what would work for the future.

Through a series of workshops, stakeholder meetings, and independent analysis, over eight  weeks we:

• Assessed the impact on the current operating model based on future digital strategy and roadmap. 
• Identified additional/uplift of capabilities to be delivered within various portfolios within the team (e.g. analytics, delivery, operations). 
• Developed the proposed operating structures within various portfolios within the team.
• Designed the target interaction model and processes between teams and other business functions. 
• Conducted significant FTE analysis and modeling to assess the costs and benefits arising due to recommendations, and proposed options to transition. 
• Outlined the transition plan that would best deliver on their mission, transition principles, and maximise the opportunities for caregivers and the organisation. 

The Outcome

The result was a detailed design and plan for the function with a high degree of clarity and ownership of the change by senior leaders who had bought into the process.

We helped St John of God deliver and implement:

• A strong business case with a clear investment and benefit profile for a five-year horizon. 
• A clear path forward for the Digital and Transformation group to better align with the business and support a significant Digital Transformation.
• The introduction of a new enterprise project management office (ePMO) that harmonized three existing PMO's from IT, Asset Development, and Business Improvement, therefore reducing duplication and improving organisational agility in the longer term. 
• Established ePMO governance forums and frameworks for the prioritisation of new and competing initiatives, ensuring proper support and processes for future projects.

When the Royal Flying Doctors needed a new operating model to improve its clinical operations, Sia Partners was asked to review what a successful business opportunity could look like across multiple stakeholders, and plan the transition. 

The Client

Royal Flying Doctors Service Western Operations (RFDS WO), is the Western Australian arm of the national RFDS body. RFDS WO delivers health services across rural and remote locations, transporting patients to clinical care. It also services commercial clients – predominantly the resources sector. In one year alone, RFDS WO flew over 9 million km to retrieve and assist 10,000 patients. 

The Ask

The RFDS WO had identified symptoms of an inefficient clinical operating model. Clinical operations, covering doctors and nurses, clinical service delivery capabilities, governance, and interacting with other parts of the RFDS WO organisation, were exhibiting significant workforce fatigue and disconnect. This was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Sia Partners Australia was engaged by RFDS WO to review its clinical operating model and identify the root causes of the symptoms. Sia Partners was also asked to develop a near-term clinical target operating model, and the associated initiatives to implement, and to identify guiding principles for what a medium-term target clinical operating model should address.

Our Approach

Sia Partner’s engagement was split into three phases of work: Discovery, Design, and Planning. 

• Discovery focused on reviewing the current state of the clinical operating model, to clarify the symptoms and the root causes. One-on-one interviews were conducted with 30+ RFDS WO stakeholders, including the executive, corporate staff, and front-line clinicians, to understand issues and opportunities and the interaction with other parts of the business, particularly operations and aviation. Additionally, we reviewed industry literature and organisational documents to validate feedback and identify relevant macro trends. This led to a clear identification of the critical issues and opportunities in and around the clinical operating model. 
• In the Design phase we worked collaboratively with RFDS stakeholders to develop the design principles of the near-term operating model, and identify pragmatic initiatives to resolve key pain points. Sia engaged key external stakeholders to obtain feedback on the operating model design. From this, a high-level scope of improvement initiatives and benefits was developed.
• The Planning phase sought to refine the initiatives developed. Sia Partners conducted workshops with key RFDS WO stakeholders to review and prioritise the initiatives based on impact and effort. These workshops enabled an open conversation to ensure scope issues and dependencies between initiatives and business groups were identified. 

Throughout the process Sia Partners engaged with multiple forums, including the RFDS WO Board and clinical-focused advisory council, to obtain input and present progress.

The Outcome

The result was a concise and well-defined list of clinical operating model initiatives, packaged into a detailed program of work. The program to deliver the near-term clinical operating model is currently underway with RFDS independently reviewing the needs and resourcing required to undertake the initiatives and implement the change required. A high-level view of the medium-term clinical operating model was also delivered, with design principles defined, preliminary initiatives identified and a next steps plan carefully considered and communicated.

The Client

The Perth Mint is Australia’s largest fully integrated precious metals enterprise, providing premium gold, silver, and platinum products and services to markets throughout the world. Owned by the government of Western Australia, the Mint is run by Gold Corporation, and has very high compliance requirements, with multiple stakeholders.

The Ask

Sia Partners was engaged to define Perth Mint’s Technology Strategy and Operating Model and manage the delivery of the resulting digital transformation program, with the aim of improving the customer experience and the technology underpinning and supporting the Mint’s operations.

Our Approach

This was a long-term project with several key milestones. During the project delivery, the Sia Partners team was embedded into the Mint, building strong relationships with the internal stakeholders and also other technology partners involved.

The following key activities and deliverables were for the program of works:

• Defining the organisational wide Digital Strategy, covering aspects including the customer experience through to supporting operations and functions.
• Defining the technology roadmap including prioritisation and phasing.
• Defining and designing the technology operating model.
• Developing a sourcing strategy and independent recommendations for the Perth Mint.
• Change management, including engagement across all levels including senior management and board level.
• Implementation and program management including client and third-party management.

The Outcome

Following the development of its digital transformation strategy, the Perth Mint moved into the implementation phase, retaining the services of Sia Partners to help deliver on the digital transformation alongside other partners. The strategy successfully aligned the technological directions to the Perth Mint’s long-term strategic plan, built a strong business case, and developed an internal operations model to support the implementation and post-implementation phases. The strategy has helped the Perth Mint to transform its customer experience and drive organisational change through an effective and efficient Operating Model and underlying architecture.

The Client

Perth Airport is the main hub in Western Australia. In the Perth Airport structure, Directors are owners’ representatives, and ultimately make the key investment decisions on large-scale strategic projects such as major capital works programs.

The Ask

Following a large-scale corporate restructure and the implementation of a new strategy, Perth Airport sought Sia Partner’s expertise to conduct a strategy execution review to ensure its new approach put them on track to becoming Australia’s Western Hub. The strategy review was a significant undertaking, requiring internal and external evaluation, context gathering, and distillation to identify progress and highlight any need for redirection. The review also needed to take into account the complexity of the business operations and its ownership structure.

Our Approach

A blended team of Sia Partners,  Perth Airport Executives, and Senior Management was brought together to lead strategy development, strategic modeling, and support strategy execution. Working side-by-side with the Perth Airport team, we helped to identify key shifts in specific landscapes and develop corporate strategic initiatives and action plans. To ensure impact against key performance indicators, we worked closely with the finance team to refresh strategic modeling, providing quantitative analysis on the impact strategic initiatives will have on Perth Airport’s Enterprise Valuation up to 2040. This was supplemented with an extensive detailed review of strategy execution and the Airport’s Enterprise Project Management operations. The Board was engaged via strategic deep-dive conversations with the Perth Airport Management Team around key initiatives and their impacts, to obtain a commitment from investors to fund the major initiatives contained in the strategy.

The Outcome

This information-gathering piece allowed Perth Airport to review the information at hand and take a holistic view of opportunities. This resulted in a refreshed strategy for Perth Airport, with ambitious targets set over multiple time horizons and supporting action plans required to execute the initiatives contained within the strategy. The Perth Airport Board endorsed the refreshed strategy and an in-principal agreement was delivered to fund major capital works and Airport estate development programs, forecast at over a billion dollars over the next decade.

When a global logistics firm needed to transform its ways of working, Sia Partners was asked to help improve its operations, taking a design thinking approach.

The Client

A global logistics firm with large multi-year, multi-million-dollar service contracts, the client had operations spanning 40 sites in Australia, plus overseas.

The Ask

Sia Partners (formerly Churchill) was engaged to improve the client’s management operating system, or ‘ways of working’. The goal was to foster a culture of performance improvement by designing a new way of working for operational and commercial teams, with data insights driving decision-making.

Our Approach

To meet the user-led design brief, Sia Partners deployed a 14-week design thinking process to activate over 45 operational and commercial representatives, across all levels of the business, a variety of operations, and across Australia.

A blended Sia Partners and client team led a design thinking process working through a series of stages:

Empathise > Define > Ideate > Prototype > Test

• Empathise and Define: 1:1 interviews and workshops, to diagnose the issues and challenges, and determine the requirements of the end solution. 
• Ideate: Refined user insights to design the required operating system and key metrics. We used the ideate stage to determine the key metrics needed in the new technology interface for site teams to use in their management operating system.
• Prototype: Ran a “Build & Pilot Phase” and deployed support teams into two operational sites.
• Testing: Focused first on building the right system and tools to provide data to the two test-site teams, before building out the people and process interface

The approach was complemented by robust business readiness and change management. We had to minimise disruptions to day-to-day operations and engage site leaders so they could champion the pilot with their teams.

We leveraged strong senior leadership buy-in on the project to connect the Sponsors to the project with site visits and clear, consistent communications to bolster operators engaging in the design process.

The Outcome

To solve the problem of efficiency losses we built the management operating system (the new way of working) to:

• Plan the contracted works and establish targets
• Monitor actual performance against those targets and assumptions
• Review via discussions to identify actions and close them out 
• Improve operational and contract performance over time

Contract requirements and assumptions are now translated into an agreed standardised language and have successfully been embedded through new ways of working.

Teams are using the new system and using the outlined process to baseline their performance, and identifying strategic actions, to pursue targets using the new metrics and systems.

The management operating system is now being scaled across the rest of the national operations, with the new system deployed to all 40+ sites by the end of 2022, improving and transforming business operations.