Project Description

Melbourne Arts Precinct

New governance arrangements for delivery of the Melbourne Arts Precinct Transformation project

> THE CONTEXT

The Melbourne Arts Precinct Transformation development is a
major cultural investment by the Victorian Government. The project
has multiple key stakeholders that all need to have meaningful
involvement in the journey of the precinct’s development. However,
their time also needs to be optimised in order to maintain efficient
momentum in the project.

> THE APPROACH

Our approach had a major consultation component, which included
benchmarking of multi-stakeholder State government project
governance arrangements, workshops with stakeholders, and
interviews with all key stakeholders. It was acknowledged that the
current structure and processes had been successful up until this
project, but that there were some difficult decisions coming up in
the next stage that would benefit from having further structure,
procedure and other risk management supports in place.

> THE BRIEF

Following the concept development and master planning processes,
our brief was to inform governance arrangements for the next
stage of the precinct – finalising design development and initiating
construction. Our role was to ‘listen and learn’; hearing from each
of the key stakeholders on what had worked well and what needed
adjusting for the future stages.

> THE CONTEXT

Our report responded to several drivers for change: the need to
deliver holistic, precinct-wide outcomes, the need for difficult
decisions to be made amongst multiple organisations, and the
ramping up of project delivery activities which increased key
risks in the incoming stage. We provided a series of key short and
medium term recommendations that included the adoption of a
precinct vision and charter, the adoption of a series of policies and
procedures that would assist with any forthcoming issues in the next
stage, and a high-level ‘route map’ to provide clarity to stakeholders
about the rest of the project.