“Critical friend” sorely needed in NZ’s infrastructure focus.
The devastating North Island floods are an example of the need for targeted investment in critical infrastructure, says a key consultant involved in the Christchurch rebuild.
New Zealand’s committed infrastructure spend – totalling $61bn over the next five years across health, housing and water – will support communities’ resilience to climate change, alongside many other vital outcomes, according to senior executives of AECOM New Zealand.
While flood defences will remain with the country’s councils, the North Island floods are a timely reminder that New Zealand needs to make sure it addresses its ‘infrastructure deficit’ effectively, says Craig Davidson, AECOM New Zealand’s Managing Director.
This historic government infrastructure spend – including a complex water market reform – must be carefully and effectively managed, he says, especially as New Zealand faces further issues, including a shortage of skilled resources and materials and inflationary pressures. Davidson says that means a programme management approach is critical in ensuring New Zealand communities ultimately benefit from the $61bn commitment.
AECOM NZ is part of the global AECOM infrastructure consulting group which has delivered major infrastructure programmes around the world, and was a partner in the acclaimed Ōtākaro Development Programme, regenerating Christchurch after the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes.
Programme management – the practice of managing a collection of separate projects holistically to deliver promised outcomes – was employed for the Ōtākaro mission to regenerate Christchurch, turning the disaster into a catalyst for positive, sustainable, long-term change through the delivery of a brand-new central city.
It was the largest and most publicised programme of its kind in New Zealand at the time, operating in a highly political environment, involving local iwi, government and businesses and Crown entities including Treasury. With such levels of scrutiny, Ōtākaro sought a trusted programme partner to manage programme costs, timelines and risks, driven by data, to ensure the social and economic benefits sought in the rebuild actually happened.
“We assisted Ōtākaro to design, establish, and resource a blended Programme Management Office (PMO) team which provided processes, procedures, tools, and systems,” says Drew Jeter, Executive Vice President and Chief Executive for AECOM’s Programme Management Global Business Line. “That helped Ōtākaro focus on delivering the desired benefits, through the inevitable challenges and changes that such a large undertaking generates.
“You might think programme management just needs someone very good at project management – but it’s way more than that; when we manage a collection of projects, it is both the next scale-up in size as well as complexity. It requires a disciplined system of orchestrated resources; money, time, human resources, and information/data across a whole selection of projects, all aligned to achieve a single set of strategic objectives.
“What that means is that we can help our clients achieve benefits aligned to their objectives that wouldn’t be possible if they’d approached these projects one at a time,” he says. “The risk is that infrastructure owners get the green light and then get lost in the delivery aspects of the projects without tracking the social, environmental and economic benefits for communities that the programme investment was originally aimed at delivering.
“We are often just one of the consultants hired,” says Jeter, “but we are the ones called ‘a critical friend’ and a ‘delivery partner’ – and we are the only ones who sit in the same seat as the infrastructure owners and who say: ‘Hey, listen – we are looking out for your interests.
“The overall focus and objectives are sometimes unfortunately forgotten in the delivery of the projects. Programme management enables us to support clients to deliver the outcomes they promised. At the heart of that is one of our core values – ESG; it’s not just putting up a building or creating a new city centre, for example; it’s about improving social and community outcomes and leaving a lasting legacy.”
The Christchurch rebuild earned Ōtākaro praise from across the industry, with the programme management approach and benefits management being described as a great model for government infrastructure investment. Ōtākaro’s remit was recently expanded to support the Government’s infrastructure aspirations nationally. The stability of the organisation over multiple election cycles has allowed it to attract good people and build capability internally so that it can deliver in a programme environment with the confidence of the Crown.
Davidson views programme management as an essential tool, when considering how to address the infrastructure deficit challenge facing New Zealand.
“Take the water sector, for example, projections show investment of between $4bn and $6bn year on year – an enormous challenge relative to current investment levels,” he says. “But the process that is under way is also a great opportunity; consolidation to a scale which supports effective resource utilisation and ongoing capital efficiencies through better decision-making, knowledge retention and innovation, and addresses some of the infrastructure delivery challenges identified by Te Waihanga (New Zealand Infrastructure Commission) in their 30-year strategy.
“Te Waihanga has already done some terrific work highlighting the importance of de-politicising infrastructure investment decision-making and delivery. A big infrastructure programme can take anywhere between 5-30 years and, if it gets wrapped around the axle of a three-year political cycle, the risk of inefficiency compromising overall objectives due to the uncertainty is significant.” Davidson says.
“Taking the framework that Te Waihanga has proposed, the good work at Ōtākaro and good programme management practices that have been proven across the globe is a really exciting prospect for New Zealand.”
Jeter says AECOM is often just one of dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of consultants involved in major infrastructure programmes around the world – such as the $2.4bn USD Capital Investment Programme for the Department of Watershed Management (DWM) in DeKalb County, Georgia, USA – a programme to address ageing water and wastewater infrastructure and support a rapidly growing population.
The Dekalb County DWM develops, operates and maintains approximately 10,000km of pipe in the water distribution and wastewater collection systems, as well as major water treatment facilities.
The network provides services to 750,000 people and is being expanded to accommodate a 30 per cent growth in population. Programme management enabled DWM to achieve this by retaining focus on the outcomes and making decisions in the context of ‘the bigger picture’. Applying this consistent approach allowed projects to be vetted and selected prior to delivery, the use of different contracts to meet different demands, and overall, the ability to deliver more than three times the volume of work each year.
With a historic infrastructure spend under way, New Zealand faces multiple challenges in ensuring taxpayers and communities get maximum benefit from this investment.
Jeter says focus on programme management, implemented early and with clear objectives in place, might be the key to unlocking an infrastructure programme that will deliver many critical outcomes across health, housing, water, energy and transport for New Zealand’s future.
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