Management challenge and productive communities: Lachlan, Wanneroo and Campbelltown
Management challenge and productive communities: Lachlan, Wanneroo and Campbelltown
Submitted by admin on 30th May 2014
The annual Local Government Managers Australia (LGMA) National Management Challenge was held in regions across Australia and New Zealand in March 2014. With over 110 teams participating, this challenging professional development exercise involves careful team working under pressure to complete a number of tasks relating to a central challenge theme. The theme for this year's Challenge was 'Productive Communities', and team participants were asked to explore this theme through the completion of a range of tasks, including the completion of a pre-challenge task which required councils to make a short video presentation outlining the 'productive community' theme as it relates to council. Another of the tasks involved writing a piece for the ACELG Town Crier blog that described their own, plus a fellow council's experience and approach to this pre-challenge task. Here we have a sample from across the span of the participating teams.
Lachlan Shire Council: The Lachlan Locals
We know videos!
A bunch of seasoned professionals from way out west of NSW were enjoined to form a formidable team to contest the 2014 LGMA Challenge. What an experience! The pre-challenge task was indeed challenging. Many a coffee was consumed and the Shire's annual supply of midnight oil was burnt in just two weeks.
The Lachlan Locals decided that our uniqueness and ongoing productivity would be the driving force of the message for our video. We threw this concept around the chamber and came up with these gems:
- We have 8 communities – 7 of these are remote from the largest town in the shire, Condobolin. The most remote town in our Shire is a good hour-and-a-half drive on our brilliant roads (we know roads too – we've looked after 4,500 kms of them for ever).
- People in each of these towns expect a certain level of amenity – clean water to drink, sewerage, waste facilities in which we can throw out the boxes our new Akubras and RM boots came in, parks devoid of weeds for our families to play in, swimming pools to cool off on those 45 degree days, and last but not least, roads – roads to get us to see the doctor in Orange and to get us to the pub on a Friday arvo (we must not forget the pub – it's the centre of the social universe for many of our towns).
- In a nut shell our video aimed to demonstrate that we may only be 7,600 people, but pound-for-pound we are as productive as anybody and, in our opinion, we do it with less money, less infrastructure, and with less support from the State and the Feds.
- The C word – Climate. Another point that we really wanted to bring to the viewer of the vid was to say that we are a bloody resilient bunch – as resilient as ten things that are resilient you could say. We have all of the same pressures that businesses in metro areas have, but we have another big elephant in the room – the climate. It never rains but it bloody pours – from drought to flood all we need is a few good seasons in a row and we'll be kicking goals.
On the day of the Challenge we were allocated a Council to team up with to discuss the pre-challenge task and the production of our video. We got Mosman. Where is Mosman anyway? One of our team members was heard to mumble, "A rolling stone gathers no moss, man". I'm sure the Mosman team were equally perplexed.
It was an uneasy alliance at first, but as the words flowed we felt more comfortable with one another – let's face it we are in the LG family after all – even if we are the poor country cousins. I'll be honest; Mosman and Lachlan are like the proverbial chalk and cheese with the tag 'LGA' being our only real commonality.
We discussed barriers with our new found Mosman friends. We at Lachlan had a number of barriers to successfully completing the pre-challenge task – to even access the video editing software one team member had to travel 250km to Bathurst. The production of the video ultimately amounted to a simple representation of the footage – Lachlan is remote and if you want something done it's gonna involve the rubber hitting the beautifully laid bitumen (or gravel as the case may be, the beautifully laid bitumen seemed to stop on our LGA boundary!?). We also drove each many of our roads for footage for the video – 571 kangaroo and emu dodging kilometres to be precise.
Mosman had no such barrier, but we did follow a very similar path in the planning and design of the vid. We both met as a team and brainstormed ideas, and each team found that there were threads of commonality flowing within each member. Like Mosman, we interviewed our GM and a Councillor and included their ideas in the production. Both teams also found that the planning for the production brought their respective teams together and also very quickly allowed teams to produce a skills matrix.
It was particularly eye opening for the Mosman Team to learn about the relative diminutiveness of their LGA (9km2 to our 7,500km2). Speaking from experience, for Lachlan team the learning outcomes of the experience were very much around developing the team dynamic. The process of producing the video was eye opening and, even though the LGAs couldn't have been more different, there was a commonality in approach made to the task by each team.
We'd love to show the Mosmanites around our shire one day and show them what our glorious shire has to offer. We'd love to be shown around theirs too. We're told that Mosman is hard to get to by public transport. Public Transport? What's that?
This blog was prepared by Andrew Johns of the 2014 Management Challenge Team 'The Lachlan Locals'.
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City of Wanneroo: PitCroo
Today
Hi, my name is Phil and I am a member of Team Pitcroo, the City of Wanneroo's entry to the 2014 LGMA Management Challenge. How did I get to sitting in the President's lounge of the home of West Australian Cricket, overlooking the beautiful green pitch below you ask? Well, let me start from the beginning...
The Beginning
At work one morning a curious email popped into my inbox: "Expression of Interest for the City of Wanneroo's LGMA Challenge Team". Huh? What on earth is an LGMA and why is it challenging the City? Included was an invitation to attend an info session with past challengers....so along I went.
"Expect the unexpected. Prepare to be challenged. A roller coaster of emotions. A lot of fun!"
The past participants spoke of their experiences with nothing but excitement and enthusiasm and I was hooked. With the approval of my coordinator and manager I submitted an EOI highlighting what I hoped to get out of the LGMA challenge - learn about the City, learn about local government, work as a team, and hopefully have fun and come out the other end in one piece smiling.
Several weeks later another curious email popped into my inbox: "Congratulations, you have been chosen for the LGMA Team". Great news I made the team :) Wait a second, I made the team....hmmm...I made the team...*cue nervous giggle.
The First Team Meeting
In equal parts excitement and nervousness we came together: a team of 6 with 2 reserves from all different units within the City – community development, business development, facilities, business systems, customer relations, finance, city business, transport and traffic.
Straight off the mark we were given our first task, a crash course in team bonding and group cohesion – pick a team name and theme. Oh and by the way you only have 5 minutes, and your time started 10 seconds ago! You can learn a lot about a person and group dynamics in 5 minutes! Ideas were slow to come at first but as the timer ticked down we picked up speed after several ideas were bounced around we decided to pay homage to the City's background of V8 supercars and Team PitCroo was born.
Pre-Challenge Task
Sitting down in one of our weekly team meetings, Tim (our fearless mentor) dropped the bombshell on us. The pre-challenge task had arrived and it was a doozy...
The theme this year is "Productive Communities".
And....?
No that's pretty much it, have fun.
At this point several questions came to mind – What do they mean? Where do we start? Surely there must be some part missing? No? Are you sure? Alright then...so off we went with a multitude of ideas buzzing in our heads.
The PitCroo Approach
The team agreed the best way to start was to define "Productive Communities", which ended up being a little more difficult than we first anticipated. Brainstorm, research, discuss, refine, repeat.
Once we were happy with the definition, we developed a SWOT and PEST analysis of the City which formed the four pillars of the pre-challenge task:
- Accessible Transport;
- Places and Spaces;
- Education/Training; and
- Employment and Community Engagement.
We then defined each of the four areas and came up with ideas for innovation based on the team's strengths and weaknesses. At this stage the ideas started flowing a lot more freely as we put together the video presentation, story board and summary document. Phew, glad that's done!
Back to Today – The PitCroo Approach Compared with Melville and Canning
One of the Challenge day tasks has been to reflect on the different approaches PitCroo took with those of the Cities of Melville and Canning.
It seems we all started the same way: by defining "productive communities" and narrowing the scope down to our specific Council. Not very surprising given the huge scope of the topic!
From there both PitCroo and team Canning took a broad approach and considered all aspects of our local governments before zeroing in on key themes. Melville, on the other hand, took a specific example of the Risely Development in Applecross and applied the learnt themes to the Council at large.
One of the common learnings of the exercise to the three Councils was the need to focus on specific issues rather than trying to capture everything which invariably leads to information overload. Working in teams and developing our general knowledge of local government was also a huge learning curve, particularly given the range of disciplines within the teams. However we found it very enjoyable to engage with and learn from people in other departments with whom we wouldn't normally cross paths in day-to-day council operations.
So that's been the journey so far. Ups, downs, craziness and a whole lot of fun. I have learnt about myself, my Council, the work we do and the people we are made up of. And who hates chilling out in stands of the WACA with our City's profile in the background soaking up the perfect Perth weather?
Yours in LGMA Challenging,
Phil and the PitCroo
This blog was prepared by Phil of the 2014 Management Challenge Team 'Pitcroo'.
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Campbelltown City Council: Campbelltown Can
Hey fellow bloggers! As part of the LGMA Challenge we had to do a pre-challenge task which knocked our socks off – we were asked 'What is a productive community?' How do we know? Or…did we know?
Our 'Campbelltown Can' Management Challenge team is made up of staff from six different sections of Council, so you can imagine the robust conversations which came out of that! So what did we learn in this process?
We learnt that our Council is big on community partnerships – we love working with members of the community and community organisations; working together to get great results for them and for us. This gave us the slant for the video presentation that we had to put together for this task.
While we are strong in partnerships with communities, we found that we could improve our partnerships with business. We needed to focus on developing better economic partnerships which would help grow the city and keep us sustainable as a local government (we don't want someone knocking on our door and giving us the boot!).
We came up with a plan of attack regarding how we could make the best of future opportunities…you know, the ones you want knocking on your door. Examples included partnerships with big business like Campbelltown Hospital, TAFE and the University of Western Sydney. We also wanted to look after the little businessman too, so we needed to focus on how we can make doing business with us more user friendly. You know, getting rid of some of the red tape.
After a great old chat with our mates at Penrith Council, we found we had some things in common in the way we approached the task. While they focused on 'doing more with the same' and we looked at 'balancing our future', our approaches to productivity were different. Penrith focused on how improving staff productivity ultimately led to a more productive community. They based this on previous research through staff surveys, as well as talking to the public. We, on the other hand, looked at productive communities in terms of community partnerships, and how they would help make better use of our resources. By looking at the partnerships that we already had in place, we identified the need to improve in terms of business partnerships. To drive this process, however, requires a greater understanding of the opportunities that can be seized by local business with council assistance. We don't have an economic development officer as of yet, while some other councils do. Do we need one? We want to talk to those of you that have one to find out whether or not this position works in terms of building business partnerships? Is it worth it? Has it helped engage business and contribute to a more productive community? You tell us!
Something that impressed us about Penrith's approach was the focus on staff. For them, a happy staff translates to better productivity, better customer service and better engagement with the community. If someone had a positive experience with the staff they would tell their mates, who would tell their mates – good news for the council. We want some of that! We think we might pinch the ideas from their staff survey too :)
Penrith also seemed quite involved with other community groups. They figured that if they helped scratch their back, the group would scratch theirs. It's like teamwork outside of your organisation – what a thought!
At the end of all this there is heaps that we still have to do – and now we have a lot of ideas in our toolkit to take back to our neighbourhood. We need to work on what's going on in our backyard, and we can't wait to start making use of these opportunities and seeing where they take us.
Campbelltown Can!
This blog was prepared by the 2014 Management Challenge Team 'Campbelltown Can'.
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Submitted by admin on 30th May 2014
The annual Local Government Managers Australia (LGMA) National Management Challenge was held in regions across Australia and New Zealand in March 2014. With over 110 teams participating, this challenging professional development exercise involves careful team working under pressure to complete a number of tasks relating to a central challenge theme. The theme for this year's Challenge was 'Productive Communities', and team participants were asked to explore this theme through the completion of a range of tasks, including the completion of a pre-challenge task which required councils to make a short video presentation outlining the 'productive community' theme as it relates to council. Another of the tasks involved writing a piece for the ACELG Town Crier blog that described their own, plus a fellow council's experience and approach to this pre-challenge task. Here we have a sample from across the span of the participating teams.
Lachlan Shire Council: The Lachlan Locals
We know videos!
A bunch of seasoned professionals from way out west of NSW were enjoined to form a formidable team to contest the 2014 LGMA Challenge. What an experience! The pre-challenge task was indeed challenging. Many a coffee was consumed and the Shire's annual supply of midnight oil was burnt in just two weeks.
The Lachlan Locals decided that our uniqueness and ongoing productivity would be the driving force of the message for our video. We threw this concept around the chamber and came up with these gems:
- We have 8 communities – 7 of these are remote from the largest town in the shire, Condobolin. The most remote town in our Shire is a good hour-and-a-half drive on our brilliant roads (we know roads too – we've looked after 4,500 kms of them for ever).
- People in each of these towns expect a certain level of amenity – clean water to drink, sewerage, waste facilities in which we can throw out the boxes our new Akubras and RM boots came in, parks devoid of weeds for our families to play in, swimming pools to cool off on those 45 degree days, and last but not least, roads – roads to get us to see the doctor in Orange and to get us to the pub on a Friday arvo (we must not forget the pub – it's the centre of the social universe for many of our towns).
- In a nut shell our video aimed to demonstrate that we may only be 7,600 people, but pound-for-pound we are as productive as anybody and, in our opinion, we do it with less money, less infrastructure, and with less support from the State and the Feds.
- The C word – Climate. Another point that we really wanted to bring to the viewer of the vid was to say that we are a bloody resilient bunch – as resilient as ten things that are resilient you could say. We have all of the same pressures that businesses in metro areas have, but we have another big elephant in the room – the climate. It never rains but it bloody pours – from drought to flood all we need is a few good seasons in a row and we'll be kicking goals.
On the day of the Challenge we were allocated a Council to team up with to discuss the pre-challenge task and the production of our video. We got Mosman. Where is Mosman anyway? One of our team members was heard to mumble, "A rolling stone gathers no moss, man". I'm sure the Mosman team were equally perplexed.
It was an uneasy alliance at first, but as the words flowed we felt more comfortable with one another – let's face it we are in the LG family after all – even if we are the poor country cousins. I'll be honest; Mosman and Lachlan are like the proverbial chalk and cheese with the tag 'LGA' being our only real commonality.
We discussed barriers with our new found Mosman friends. We at Lachlan had a number of barriers to successfully completing the pre-challenge task – to even access the video editing software one team member had to travel 250km to Bathurst. The production of the video ultimately amounted to a simple representation of the footage – Lachlan is remote and if you want something done it's gonna involve the rubber hitting the beautifully laid bitumen (or gravel as the case may be, the beautifully laid bitumen seemed to stop on our LGA boundary!?). We also drove each many of our roads for footage for the video – 571 kangaroo and emu dodging kilometres to be precise.
Mosman had no such barrier, but we did follow a very similar path in the planning and design of the vid. We both met as a team and brainstormed ideas, and each team found that there were threads of commonality flowing within each member. Like Mosman, we interviewed our GM and a Councillor and included their ideas in the production. Both teams also found that the planning for the production brought their respective teams together and also very quickly allowed teams to produce a skills matrix.
It was particularly eye opening for the Mosman Team to learn about the relative diminutiveness of their LGA (9km2 to our 7,500km2). Speaking from experience, for Lachlan team the learning outcomes of the experience were very much around developing the team dynamic. The process of producing the video was eye opening and, even though the LGAs couldn't have been more different, there was a commonality in approach made to the task by each team.
We'd love to show the Mosmanites around our shire one day and show them what our glorious shire has to offer. We'd love to be shown around theirs too. We're told that Mosman is hard to get to by public transport. Public Transport? What's that?
This blog was prepared by Andrew Johns of the 2014 Management Challenge Team 'The Lachlan Locals'.
Back to the Town Crier
City of Wanneroo: PitCroo
Today
Hi, my name is Phil and I am a member of Team Pitcroo, the City of Wanneroo's entry to the 2014 LGMA Management Challenge. How did I get to sitting in the President's lounge of the home of West Australian Cricket, overlooking the beautiful green pitch below you ask? Well, let me start from the beginning...
The Beginning
At work one morning a curious email popped into my inbox: "Expression of Interest for the City of Wanneroo's LGMA Challenge Team". Huh? What on earth is an LGMA and why is it challenging the City? Included was an invitation to attend an info session with past challengers....so along I went.
"Expect the unexpected. Prepare to be challenged. A roller coaster of emotions. A lot of fun!"
The past participants spoke of their experiences with nothing but excitement and enthusiasm and I was hooked. With the approval of my coordinator and manager I submitted an EOI highlighting what I hoped to get out of the LGMA challenge - learn about the City, learn about local government, work as a team, and hopefully have fun and come out the other end in one piece smiling.
Several weeks later another curious email popped into my inbox: "Congratulations, you have been chosen for the LGMA Team". Great news I made the team :) Wait a second, I made the team....hmmm...I made the team...*cue nervous giggle.
The First Team Meeting
In equal parts excitement and nervousness we came together: a team of 6 with 2 reserves from all different units within the City – community development, business development, facilities, business systems, customer relations, finance, city business, transport and traffic.
Straight off the mark we were given our first task, a crash course in team bonding and group cohesion – pick a team name and theme. Oh and by the way you only have 5 minutes, and your time started 10 seconds ago! You can learn a lot about a person and group dynamics in 5 minutes! Ideas were slow to come at first but as the timer ticked down we picked up speed after several ideas were bounced around we decided to pay homage to the City's background of V8 supercars and Team PitCroo was born.
Pre-Challenge Task
Sitting down in one of our weekly team meetings, Tim (our fearless mentor) dropped the bombshell on us. The pre-challenge task had arrived and it was a doozy...
The theme this year is "Productive Communities".
And....?
No that's pretty much it, have fun.
At this point several questions came to mind – What do they mean? Where do we start? Surely there must be some part missing? No? Are you sure? Alright then...so off we went with a multitude of ideas buzzing in our heads.
The PitCroo Approach
The team agreed the best way to start was to define "Productive Communities", which ended up being a little more difficult than we first anticipated. Brainstorm, research, discuss, refine, repeat.
Once we were happy with the definition, we developed a SWOT and PEST analysis of the City which formed the four pillars of the pre-challenge task:
- Accessible Transport;
- Places and Spaces;
- Education/Training; and
- Employment and Community Engagement.
We then defined each of the four areas and came up with ideas for innovation based on the team's strengths and weaknesses. At this stage the ideas started flowing a lot more freely as we put together the video presentation, story board and summary document. Phew, glad that's done!
Back to Today – The PitCroo Approach Compared with Melville and Canning
One of the Challenge day tasks has been to reflect on the different approaches PitCroo took with those of the Cities of Melville and Canning.
It seems we all started the same way: by defining "productive communities" and narrowing the scope down to our specific Council. Not very surprising given the huge scope of the topic!
From there both PitCroo and team Canning took a broad approach and considered all aspects of our local governments before zeroing in on key themes. Melville, on the other hand, took a specific example of the Risely Development in Applecross and applied the learnt themes to the Council at large.
One of the common learnings of the exercise to the three Councils was the need to focus on specific issues rather than trying to capture everything which invariably leads to information overload. Working in teams and developing our general knowledge of local government was also a huge learning curve, particularly given the range of disciplines within the teams. However we found it very enjoyable to engage with and learn from people in other departments with whom we wouldn't normally cross paths in day-to-day council operations.
So that's been the journey so far. Ups, downs, craziness and a whole lot of fun. I have learnt about myself, my Council, the work we do and the people we are made up of. And who hates chilling out in stands of the WACA with our City's profile in the background soaking up the perfect Perth weather?
Yours in LGMA Challenging,
Phil and the PitCroo
This blog was prepared by Phil of the 2014 Management Challenge Team 'Pitcroo'.
Back to the Town Crier
Campbelltown City Council: Campbelltown Can
Hey fellow bloggers! As part of the LGMA Challenge we had to do a pre-challenge task which knocked our socks off – we were asked 'What is a productive community?' How do we know? Or…did we know?
Our 'Campbelltown Can' Management Challenge team is made up of staff from six different sections of Council, so you can imagine the robust conversations which came out of that! So what did we learn in this process?
We learnt that our Council is big on community partnerships – we love working with members of the community and community organisations; working together to get great results for them and for us. This gave us the slant for the video presentation that we had to put together for this task.
While we are strong in partnerships with communities, we found that we could improve our partnerships with business. We needed to focus on developing better economic partnerships which would help grow the city and keep us sustainable as a local government (we don't want someone knocking on our door and giving us the boot!).
We came up with a plan of attack regarding how we could make the best of future opportunities…you know, the ones you want knocking on your door. Examples included partnerships with big business like Campbelltown Hospital, TAFE and the University of Western Sydney. We also wanted to look after the little businessman too, so we needed to focus on how we can make doing business with us more user friendly. You know, getting rid of some of the red tape.
After a great old chat with our mates at Penrith Council, we found we had some things in common in the way we approached the task. While they focused on 'doing more with the same' and we looked at 'balancing our future', our approaches to productivity were different. Penrith focused on how improving staff productivity ultimately led to a more productive community. They based this on previous research through staff surveys, as well as talking to the public. We, on the other hand, looked at productive communities in terms of community partnerships, and how they would help make better use of our resources. By looking at the partnerships that we already had in place, we identified the need to improve in terms of business partnerships. To drive this process, however, requires a greater understanding of the opportunities that can be seized by local business with council assistance. We don't have an economic development officer as of yet, while some other councils do. Do we need one? We want to talk to those of you that have one to find out whether or not this position works in terms of building business partnerships? Is it worth it? Has it helped engage business and contribute to a more productive community? You tell us!
Something that impressed us about Penrith's approach was the focus on staff. For them, a happy staff translates to better productivity, better customer service and better engagement with the community. If someone had a positive experience with the staff they would tell their mates, who would tell their mates – good news for the council. We want some of that! We think we might pinch the ideas from their staff survey too :)
Penrith also seemed quite involved with other community groups. They figured that if they helped scratch their back, the group would scratch theirs. It's like teamwork outside of your organisation – what a thought!
At the end of all this there is heaps that we still have to do – and now we have a lot of ideas in our toolkit to take back to our neighbourhood. We need to work on what's going on in our backyard, and we can't wait to start making use of these opportunities and seeing where they take us.
Campbelltown Can!
This blog was prepared by the 2014 Management Challenge Team 'Campbelltown Can'.
Back to the Town Crier
