City of Canada Bay

We utilised our proprietary Improvement Model to understand the council’s current state process and to devise and implement a more efficient process.

The first phase of the model, Process Discovery, enabled us to uncover the root causes of the council’s time-consuming DA process. Issues were identified with process structure, internal culture, customer service practices, and poor quality of submissions.

The next stage, Process Design, involved meetings with staff and stakeholders to devise potential solutions. It was found that suitable solutions included: establishing a regular cross-team meeting, development of a training module, and a new prioritisation and tracking process for applications.

The final stage, Process Implementation, saw us working with council staff to implement these solutions and create instruction manuals for ongoing uptake of the new process. This phase also required us to steer the change management component of the project to ensure that all relevant stakeholders were aware and confident in applying the new DA process.

The outcome of our work was an optimisation of the council’s DA process from 296 steps to 35 steps to reach a DA determination. This resulted in dramatically reduced processing timeframes for applicants, along with other benefits such as a more streamlined referral process, improved customer communication, and better handling across the organisation.