August 2012 Newsletter - Detail

David Rushton Appointed as Managing Director of Caravel Group Pty Limited

David Rushton has been appointed as the Managing Director for Caravel in Australia effective 1 August 2012. David has been with the company for 9 years with his last 3 years in senior delivery roles working on client projects.

David has a track record of complex infrastructure delivery across many industries including Defence, Utilities, Rail, Banking and Food and Beverage. David is therefore well placed to assist our clients in delivery of their complex infrastructure projects now and into the future.

Paul Myers will continue in his role as Chairman of the Board and increase his focus on his strategic advisory role for internal and external clients.

Welcome to Chris Rowan

Caravel welcomes Chris Rowan to the team. Chris will be developing our core service delivery and practice management systems to support our expanding delivery capability. He will also be responsible for our business intelligence, knowledge management and data mining capabilities together with deployment of new and improved tools. Chris will also be assisting with the deployment and administration of our Governance survey.

Investment Logic Mapping
A pictorial view of a business problem, solutions and benefits.

Certified Caravel staff members have deployed the Investment Management Standard developed by the Victorian Government’s Department of Treasury and Finance (DTF) to assist business at the front end of the investment lifecycle. The Investment Management Standard provides a decision making framework built on informed discussion to build a logical depiction of problems and benefits. Using a series of facilitated workshops, a description of the problem, potential solutions and benefits are developed and visually depicted on a single page as an investment logic map (ILM).

The Investment Management Standard approach has been mandated for use in all investment programmes within Victoria. It has also been adopted by New Zealand Treasury as an integral part of their Better Business Case (BBC) process. It is being used for example, to provide the strategic case for investment in the reconstruction of Christchurch.

Caravel Group (through its certified staff) has been one of the first to apply the Investment Management Standard to the benefit of our clients.

One of our certified facilitators is working with a number of Government agencies to establish their investment priorities and ensuring the reasons for deploying resources are justified by the expected benefits.

For more information about applying the Investment Management Standard,
please contact Jim McMahon in our Wellington office on:
+64-4-499-4997 (jim.mcmahon@caravel.co.nz)
or David Rushton in our Sydney Office on:
+61-2-9499-8454 (david.rushton@caravelgroup.com.au).

Governance Survey Commenced

Caravel and the Melbourne Business School have commenced our ground breaking Governance survey with a series of mini-surveys having been sent to all of our survey participants. The feedback has been fantastic and the level of response shows how important this research into Governance is for business. We will keep you informed of progress as the survey progresses. If you have not yet registered your interest, please feel free to e-mail us at chris.rowan@caravelgroup.com.au or call us on +61-2-9499 8454.

Complex Infrastructure™ Explained

Caravel is a specialist in delivery of Complex Infrastructure™. Complex Infrastructure is best described as the integrated operational solution that enables infrastructure to be deployed, operated, maintained and ultimately disposed of.

The following diagram summarises where Complex Infrastructure™ sits relative to the more common infrastructure components:

Complex Infrastructure™ is often the Achilles heel of infrastructure projects and inherently carries the most risk (although this is often not recognised within the risk profile of the project).

This is because the Complex Infrastructure™ space is the convergence of the 8 elements of solution change being the integrated mix of Emotion, Capability, Process, Environment, Technology, Information, Structure and Culture (or “C8” as we collectively call these elements).

All of these elements have to be ready for a transition from the current mode of operation to the future mode of operation if a successful solution is to be implemented. In addition to this, they must be ready for deployment at both the management level and the operational solution level. We call this “The game of 2 halves and 2 levels”.

Your ability to successfully deploy infrastructure operationally is very dependent upon how well all the integrated C8 elements are managed for both the operational solution and the management solution to which it is linked.

If you would like more information on Complex Infrastructure™ or where we may be able to help you, please see our website www.caravelgroup.com.au or if you wish to speak to someone in person, see the Contact Us page for your closest office.

Current News Topic – Rightsizing Organisations

Throughout Australia, the media are reporting that there are significant changes being made to the size and structure of organisations in response to the global economic environment and the local 2 speed economy. The overwhelming approach being reported is to cut the numbers of staff with an emphasis on maintaining front line services – this is particularly the case with public sector organisations and to a lesser extent private sector organisations.

Rightsizing has a number of serious impacts on an organisation that are not necessarily considered when the change strategy is being developed.

The change strategy is often established in the context of the current and future organisations as documented. The expected benefits therefore reflect this context. What is often forgotten is that most organisations actually operate using an undocumented informal network that works in parallel with the formal organisational structure. In addition to this, most organisations rely on the knowledge and experience of the employees to execute business processes that are otherwise undocumented. The net result is that there are often more informal arrangements in place to facilitate delivery of services or to manage disconnects within the organisation than would otherwise be expected.

When re-sizing, many of these informal arrangements break down leading to a loss of productivity that is significantly more than would otherwise be predicted through the loss of effort associated with the lost positions as seen on paper.

In order to minimise the impact of these unintended consequences, re-sizing should be treated like any other organisational change project within the organisation. An assessment of the impact of the changes on emotion, capability, process, technology, structure, information, environment and culture needs to be made to assess the impact of the proposed change and to direct the required changes to the management and operational structures to manage the new target organisation in its future mode of operation.