industry
Government
Key takeaways
- 200+ Projects
- Customer reports
- Increased communication
- Improved productivity
An Australian state government department responsible for effective and sustainable forecasting employs authorities in urban and regional development, natural resources, industry, environment, Aboriginal and social housing and water to support the growth of the state.
This specific agency is tasked with dozens of evidence-based civic projects for the state’s cities and regions to create safe and sustainable places for people to live, work and spend their leisure time with reasonable access to transport and other cultural amenities like theatres, museums, restaurants and shops.
With hundreds of projects to manage on an exhaustive calendar— from building more and better homes to creating a public open-space strategy, saving our native species and maximising community benefit from government land and property— this agency, like an increasing number of public sector departments, has embraced the PMO to improve project and program management by working with Sensei.
Situation
The problem the public sector agency had was that they were using a suite of standardised reporting layouts and formats yielding minimal transparency and data. While these analytics did report on the nuts and bolts of each project—the who, what and when—they did not deliver robust data that told the ‘why’ – connecting the project’s outcomes to the delivery of agreed organisational goals.
The standardised reporting they had in place delivered the same analytics to everyone who assessed them, but one key factor was missing from this scenario: Every individual stakeholder had their own definition of what success meant and their own KPIs and OKRs to meet. Hence, they needed to access data that would meet those individual tracking needs, and the only way to do that was to build numerous customised reports with their PMO to see how projects were working and why they were or were not leading to the desired results.
Solution
In order to meet the growing needs of their PMO, Sensei developed and implemented a custom reports function that allowed the agency to quickly and efficiently gain more clarity on project aspects and translate pointed data into actionable insights. Further to that, Sensei created a tagging feature that enabled PMs to define tags to easily create new groupings of identified projects. The attributed tags then became available to all users to add to future projects, streamlining the reporting process for users at all levels and stages. As a result of Sensei’s work, this public sector department became agile in adopting custom components that had been tried and tested within another public sector department Sensei had previously helped and ultimately were able to increase communication, improve productivity, demonstrate value and aid efficient decision-making within the department.
