SurePact has further expanded its reach into regional Queensland, with Carpentaria Shire Council choosing to use SurePact to manage and deliver its various projects.
Carpentaria Shire covers an area of approximately 65,000 square kilometers and has a population of 1,974 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, 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.
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,” Carpentaria Shire Council CEO Mark 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 new 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.”
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 recently undertaken the process of identifying all of the projects that were on scraps of paper in staff drawers and in people’s heads,” Mark says. “We captured these on a spreadsheet, so they weren’t 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. We are very keen to be working with SurePact and to begin to move these projects from our spreadsheet into the SurePact system to best manage the projects from initiative and grant funding, through to project delivery and acquittal.”
While still in the very early stages of the Council’s engagement with SurePact, Mark can already see the SurePact difference.
“Like some of the longer standing SurePact clients, Carpentaria Shire is a small remote Council with limited resources, and we want to become more professional in our approach to project delivery,” he says. “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 Megan and her team.
“The solution that has been developed by SurePact in relation to project management, risk identification and asset information appealed to us, along with the reporting and oversight for the senior executive team.
“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. And with the additional funding provided by the State and Federal Government during COVID, there are quite a few of them.”
Mark highlights the ability of SurePact’s Business Intelligence and Dashboard Reporting will provide him with oversight that he wouldn’t 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 that 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.
“I have been impressed with the progress that SurePact has made as a company, the awards it has received in a short timeframe, and the testimonials from other clients who are using the system and the benefits it provides to them.”
