Local councils are not unfamiliar with crisis management and providing their constituents with emergency relief. From droughts to bushfires, major storms and long-term erosion, small government needs to have a diverse skill set to handle the myriad of issues that can arise in their communities.

The pandemic, however, presented a challenge unlike anything experience before. From financial disruption due to residents being unable to pay their rates, to the need for internal staff to wear multiple hats in the workplace, agility is essential now more than ever for modern local councils to thrive in the wake of pandemic. But with so many priorities how do you identify the ones that will offer the best return for your community? Leanne Griffiths, Consultant and Organisational Change Management Expert at PM-Partners offers some advice.

Investing in the right projects

PM-Partners has spent 25 years working with a variety of local councils, helping them adopt agile processes, pivot to new strategies and ride out the challenges unique to small government. And right now, it’s more important than ever for local councils to use their funding wisely.

A local council’s primary source of funding is still their rates but Covid grace periods on rate payments and controversial rate caps have hampered the ability of many councils to collect or increase rates. Because this is taxpayer money, they need to be completely transparent about how they generate new income – whether it’s through grants or funding from the state government.

The following offers a few examples of some of the challenges local councils have faced and how PM-Partners helped to navigate a way through:

Finding efficiency through smarter initiatives

PM-Partners has worked alongside local councils for many years, including a historic council in Western Sydney. The initiatives they started together became more critical than ever during Covid.

During my time with this local council we worked on building a project management framework, and helped them set up a portfolio office so they could monitor all their ongoing projects in one consolidated view.

What that allowed them to do is get more efficient about what they are doing, what the timings are and to ensure resources are appropriately allocated. As a result, they’re able to deliver projects in a more efficient way with any potential difficulties being spotted immediately because everything is in the one place.

Achieving total visibility across initiatives

Another local council on the NSW South Coast went through a similar process with PM-Partners, notably developing a portfolio office so they could achieve total visibility across the whole of council. This helped them streamline their community initiatives while also ensuring the councillors truly understood where they can spend their funding.

This particular local council needed that instant visibility because of their funding situation, and we worked to help answer critical questions:

• What are the high priorities?
• What needs to be done?
• Where’s the line drawn from a funding perspective?

In this setting, funding and portfolio management have been critical components of the work we performed.

Upskilling despite reduced funding

The aftermath of the pandemic resulted in the closure of many businesses – and in some cases entire industries were jilted. It also caused some organisations to stagnate, as they no longer had the financial capacity to invest in their people and their long-term strategies.

As a seasoned HR and change management specialist, I too felt the impacts to delivery as a result of skill shortages, and employee churn. In our ‘new’ post-pandemic workplace, investing in upskilling remains an essential task in order to keep councils running smoothly, and to enable existing staff and new hires to hit the ground running.

In my experience, when a council wants to set up a portfolio office it’s about educating their internal team and bringing that skill level up. Councillors have to be very strict in respect to how they fund this, for example, when engaging consultants they have to have specific skills in order to successfully fulfil the role. So whether it’s setting up and running a portfolio office or project frameworks, there must be the ability to bring people over to those new teams. Without the funding to hire additional staff, the challenge then becomes upskilling internally – and training them up with external consultants.

That should be the biggest focus today, defining the internal capability first and foremost, and then upskilling those capabilities. By doing so, it means people are able to multitask more and are capable of wearing lots of different hats in their role. In the new-world, a project coordinator may also have to support the portfolio office set-up so their team can get that consolidated view across everything. This is why investing in your people is the best way forward in 2022.

Are you looking to upskill staff, better manage projects or set up a portfolio office for total visibility? Contact the experts at PM-Partners or call 1300 70 13 14 today.

 

Article updated 8 June 2022. Original post 22 Sept, 2020.