The client
Carpentaria Shire is a local government area in North West Queensland, where the Outback meets the Sea. It covers an area of approximately 65,000 square kilometers and has a population of approximately 2,000 people.
The region’s infrastructure and facilities include sealed access roads, well-serviced airports, developed freight routes, primary and secondary schools, medical services, recreation and sporting facilities.
The Shire is located on the Savannah Way in North Western Queensland in the southeastern region of the Gulf of Carpentaria, for which it is named, and is the traditional country of many Indigenous groups. The townships of Normanton and Karumba are the traditional land of the Gkuthaarn, Kukatj and Kurtijar people.
The problem
Like many of SurePact’s long-standing clients, Carpentaria Shire is a small remote Council with limited resources and a keen interest in becoming more professional in its approach to project delivery.
“Carpentaria Shire Council has recently undertaken the process of identifying all of the projects that were on scraps of paper in staff drawers and in people’s heads,” Carpentaria Shire Council CEO Mark Crawley says. “We captured these on a spreadsheet, so they were not initially lost, and then started to run these projects through a decision matrix.
“This initially was a very basic spreadsheet, used to store project information, and then it became more complicated in nature as we began to identify if these projects would require funding from grants or whether they were possible through our own source revenue.
“It quickly became clear that negotiating these projects on a complex spreadsheet wasn’t a long-term solution.”
The solution
SurePact provides an integrated system to Councils, acting as a single point of management for a variety of projects and also as a dedicated system for grant management.
Carpentaria Shire Council has chosen to integrate SurePact into its business processes due to the Council’s continued ambition to enhance its management and delivery of projects.
“We are always seeking to become more professional in relation to managing and delivering our projects,” Crawley says. “We pride ourselves on our ability to deliver a quality project on behalf of our community and other levels of Government.
“Whether it be a project for the Department of Transport and Main Roads or the Commonwealth Government through the Local Roads and Community Infrastructure programs, we always strive to remain efficient and experienced in our approach and deliver on time and within budget.
“The implementation and use of the SurePact solution will add to this commitment and drive.”
The results
Even in the early stages of implementation, Council Officers can already see the benefits of the SurePact system, in providing excellent oversight in relation to grants, project, contracts and risk management.
“As the CEO at Carpentaria Shire Council, I look forward to having the opportunity to gain a quick overview of all the projects that are currently underway at Council,” Crawley says. “We are keen to be working with SurePact to move our projects from spreadsheets into the SurePact system to best manage projects all the way from initiative and grant funding, through to project delivery and acquittal.”
Crawley highlights the ability of SurePact’s Business Intelligence and Dashboard Reporting, which provides him with oversight that he would not usually get without a series of discussions with managers and directors. This allows for the streamlining of resources and the reallocating of valuable time.
“Even though we are a small, under-resourced and remote Council, we believe we can provide a formal approach to all that we do,” he says. “Engaging with SurePact to provide this solution will assist us in maintaining this approach in relation to project and contract delivery.
“The commitment of SurePact to work with clients so that the benefits of the system are fully realised is one of the attractions we saw in working with [SurePact Founder and CEO] Megan Avard and her team.
“The SurePact team has been very accommodating in working with the team locally to get the most from the system, and we are looking forward to the SurePact team visiting Council on site to progress further with our project load.”
