Speed and capacity in major infrastructure procurement

Improving public works planning and setting the bar for government procurement operations

The Challenge

Transport Canberra and City Services (TCCS) is the government agency responsible for managing public transport, city infrastructure, and municipal services, ensuring Canberra's residents benefit from efficient transport systems and well-maintained urban spaces.

The enormous (and growing) scale of on-going maintenance work across its portfolio of infrastructure assets, requires a breadth of contractors to deliver and thus significant procurement activity. With an increasing weight of maintenance required, TCCS needed to transform its procurement processes.

Challenges that slowed the operations included:

• Manual work management and tracking

• Unnecessary internal consultations and leadership escalations

• Excessive design rework cycles with partner agencies

• Poor visibility of work progress

The Approach

The leadership set goals to not only significantly bring down the processing time to deliver a new procurement cycle, but also to raise transparency and probity of how it did these. TCCS used XeP3 to identify and remove the sources of “Noise”, not just the symptoms.

Through the investigation and analysis, TCCS found over a quarter of their total process effort to deliver procurements was Noise - reflecting a sizeable opportunity to create capacity. Underlying issues quantified by XeP3 included excessive back-and-forth’s finalising contracts between numerous teams, use of manual tools, and reworking staff errors.

The TCCS team redesigned the process, supporting policies, and the roles themselves. XeP3 demonstrated the new process design reduced effort to the process and created 30% capacity for the team.

The Results

TCCS led a rapid implementation program to fix the causes of noise and redesign operations

• The new process designed created 30% operational capacity by addressing the noise they found

• TCCS invested the new capacity created into more procurement capability to invest dedicated expertise to major projects and improve risk management

Using XeP3 meant that the TCCS team sincerely engaged their people from the beginning, meaning staff felt a difference in the approach and were far more interested to input to the project at all stages than in most other past projects - leading to the changes being lasting.