Case study - Hawke's Bay Regional Council
After Cyclone Gabrielle, HBRC had to scale from around five million dollars of infrastructure work a year to a programme worth 250 to 300 million. A new 50 person PMO, mostly recent recruits, needed fast access to correct processes that were scattered across formats and locations.
Touchstone established the critical project processes and an information and document management framework, then made the approved processes reachable in one click through an interactive lifecycle map built on Microsoft Teams and the council's existing software.
The engagement was delivered under budget and required no additional software investment. Project managers can now reach the right process and drill into detailed steps in one click, and the framework is being reused for other council functions.
Touchstone was able to see the wood for the trees and put together a clear and concise vision of our project lifecycle processes
Jon Kingsford, Manager, Regional Projects, Hawke's Bay Regional Council
Cyclone Gabrielle changed the scale of Hawke’s Bay Regional Council’s infrastructure obligations overnight. An organisation accustomed to delivering around five million dollars of capital work a year faced a recovery and resilience programme worth between 250 and 300 million.
Delivering it meant standing up a new Infrastructure Project Management Office of around fifty people. Most were recent recruits, brought in quickly, from a range of organisations and delivery backgrounds.
The council was not short of process. It was short of accessible process.
Procedures existed across different formats and locations, written at different times for different purposes, and there was no reliable way for a project manager to know which one applied to the job in front of them. For a small team of long-serving staff that is an inconvenience. For fifty people who joined in the last six months it is a structural problem, because the usual fallback of asking a colleague does not work when the colleague is also new.
Left alone, that produces fifty individually reasonable approaches to the same task, and a programme that cannot be reported on because no two projects were run the same way.
We established the critical project processes and an information and document management framework covering how project documents are created, controlled, approved and found.
The part that made the difference was access. We built an interactive project lifecycle map that put every approved process one click away, and hosted it in Microsoft Teams alongside the council’s existing software. A project manager could open the map, see the whole delivery lifecycle, and drill directly into the detail for the stage they were at.
Alongside it we delivered a document governance framework, a controlled document library, internal document templates and a mapped gate review process.
The engagement was delivered under budget and required no additional software investment, which mattered for an organisation already committing its capital budget to recovery work.
Project managers can now reach the correct process immediately rather than asking someone or guessing. New starters become productive faster because the way work is done is visible rather than transmitted informally. And the framework has since been reused for other council functions, which was not a project objective but is the clearest evidence it was built the right way.