industry
Government
Key takeaways
- Removed disruptions
- Improved ownership
- Increased accountability
- Updated Insights reporting
An Australian government agency responsible for the delivery of advice and high quality, accessible social, health and child support services and payments engaged the expertise of Sensei to assist with their PMO.
The agency delivers support in a variety of ways including the provision of public health care such as covering the costs of basic GP visits, acquiring medicines and accessing mental health care. They also provide social welfare payments and assist parents with childcare.
With so much in their remit, this agency needs to be nimble, able to seamlessly shift from task to task, project to project with minimal interference or delays.
Situation
Prior to engaging Sensei with a PPM solution that would enable this essential government agency to work efficiently across all projects and portfolios, they were experiencing two separate issues requiring solutions:
- With over 5 million customers to serve across the different pillars of the agency each year, including aged pensioners, family tax benefit customers, job seekers, carers and students, they found themselves bogged down by status updates that needed to be approved by a manager before being distributed or reported upon.
- Risk ownership needed to be clearly and visibly accepted by the user who was assigned as the owner of the project.
Solution
To assist this agency with their approval process for status updates across the different business units, Sensei helped implement a broadened course of action that documented when and where updates were submitted and if they were approved or rejected, including the reasons why either choice was made and by whom. The new features included an update of Insights reporting to ensure only approved status reports were presented in final versions.
Regarding the issue of risk ownership, Sensei understood the importance of assigning ownership for a risk to mitigate blowouts caused by lack of accountability and action. To help this agency achieve this, Sensei embedded an acceptance process into their PPM solution that included the comprehensive logging of acceptance or rejection of risk ownership and an associated comment to describe further actions to be taken to confirm or rectify the status of the risk assignment.
Outcome
As a result of Sensei’s ability to customise the PPM solution to this agency’s PMO and streamline their ability to service the Australian public in health, employment and welfare, they provided overwhelmingly positive feedback during review and testing of the added features which, at present, are being more broadly tested before the official release of the product.
