Delivering the project

Use established frameworks and tools

For any project, use your agency’s established project management frameworks, procedures, tools, and templates when:

• developing business cases
• creating project plans
• confirming resourcing requirements
• tracking project costs
• identifying and mitigating risks
• reporting on progress.

This helps ensure your project will be delivered on time, within budget, and to the quality expected.

Independent Quality Assurance (IQA) may also be used to confirm your project is:

• following approved methodology
• appropriately escalating issues
• remaining within scope and on-track towards achieving the expected benefits.

Understand how people are using the current space

To ensure what is delivered will meet people's needs, look at:

• how people use the current spaces
• what works well and what doesn't
• technology and mobility needs
• your organisation's workforce strategy and flexible working practices
• whether certain roles or teams have specific workplace needs.

Ways to gather workplace insights include:

• workshops and interviews - help you understand business needs, team workflows and any specific role requirements.
• workplace surveys – collect insights from a wider group about current workplace satisfaction, challenges and opportunities.
• utilisation and occupancy studies - identify how spaces are used over time including peak occupancy, and under used areas.

A space management tool that tracks the use of space provides the most reliable data.

Prioritise change and communications

Change support and communications should be a key project workstream. Ultimately the project will impact people, not just the physical space.

People will need to know:

• what is changing and why
• what impact it will have for them
• what they need to do and when

Engage leaders and unions to support the change

For the project to be successful, people leaders should actively support the change by:

• managing expectations and reinforcing key messages
• modelling expected behaviours
• helping teams settle into their new environment and adopting any new ways of working
• being committed to embedding the change beyond project closure.

Active engagement with unions where appropriate can help identify staff concerns early, and support communications to address these.

Gather feedback and insights for future improvement

• Handover to the business at the end of the project includes confirming what’s been delivered meets quality measures and user expectations.
• Post-implementation reviews should provide senior leaders with confidence that your project has achieved the expected outcomes.
• For major property investment, a benefits management plan will be one of the key deliverables for the project.
• For any project, any lessons learned should be captured to inform planning for future projects. These are usually gathered through a session with the project team, and key stakeholders (including people leaders) following go-live.