Consistently meeting timelines and budgets can be elusive when delivering multiple multi-million-dollar community infrastructure projects each year but the use of a customised project management framework (PMF) is giving the City of Gosnells, Western Australia, clear results.
Introduced in July 2020, the City’s new PMF is providing a more aligned approach to managing projects, helping project team members understand and achieve their goals and allowing them to communicate more effectively.
Mayor, David Goode said ‘the framework’ identified project requirements and outcomes, stakeholders, risks, costs and provided real-time updates.
“The aim was to create a simple, shared system to guide the City’s major projects, including this financial year’s 272 capital works projects.
“It has made a tremendous difference to the way staff plan, develop, implement and report on projects and because the system was created in-house, there is better integration with existing systems and opportunities for continual improvement of the framework.”
The framework is based on Prince2 principles, an internationally recognised project management process, which has been adapted to use existing Council software to integrate with finance and recordkeeping programs and to streamline reporting and auditing processes.
Projects are overseen by Council’s Executive team, a project sponsor and project manager, with each project having a central repository of documentation from inception to practical completion.
Mayor Goode said the framework provided simple reports on individual projects, along with an overview of each project managers’ workload and project status, with a traffic light system to give advance warning if a project is falling off-track.
“The PMF has completely transformed delivery of projects for our Infrastructure Directorate, and the response from staff to the new operating environment has been great, with teams rapidly adopting this system as standard work practice.”
