Our client is a Victorian Government energy safety statutory body that regulates the safe supply of electrical equipment. They are responsible for hosting and maintaining the Australian and New Zealand Electrical Equipment Safety System (EESS) National Database.

The EESS Standing Committee of Officials (SCO) charged our client with the responsibility of obtaining all Australian and New Zealand legislative, regulatory and stakeholder requirements for a replacement EESS platform.

Terra Firma was engaged to identify these requirements and ensure the smooth, compliant development of a new platform.

Australia and New Zealand are made up of multiple diverse sovereign jurisdictions. Each has their own legislation concerning the safe supply of electrical equipment to consumers.

Only some of these jurisdictions conformed with EESS Equipment Safety Rules. Several did not participate in the Intergovernmental Agreement for the EESS to align their legislation with Queensland EESS Law.

Stakeholder types were varied and had competing needs. These included:

• Electrical Equipment Safety and Compliance Certifiers.
• Australian Electrical Equipment manufacturers and importers.
• Consultants employed to conduct data entry for supplier and equipment registration by the manufacturers and importers.
• Industry representatives and lobbyists focused on their client’s needs.
• Wholesalers, retailers, the public, and regulators.

COVID-19 lockdown ensured all further workshops, meetings, and presentations were held virtually online with subsequent occasional network issues.

We provided our client with experts who can deliver Business Requirements Documentation (BRD) and enable the future development of an integrated electrical equipment registration and certification platform.

Our client needed to develop a platform that was user-friendly and aligns with legislation. It should encourage usage and electrical equipment safety compliance, combined with data analytical, audit, and compliance support functionality.

Terra Firma baselined the scope of the EESS platform and documented comparisons between the jurisdictions by analysing the legislation’s cause and intent. From this investigation, we extracted a Functional Capability Overview, detailed the immovable legislative and regulatory requirements, and cross-referenced the source clauses to provide traceability. We presented these findings to the EESS SCO and obtained approval.

Terra Firma undertook broad stakeholder engagement by scheduling workshops, surveys, and interviews. We conducted and facilitated face-to-face and virtual collaboration workshops to capture stakeholder requirements and insights.

We provided stakeholder follow-up capability by documenting traceability of all comments to the stakeholder, their role, location, and date of capture. To support this initiative, we also captured current best practice activities planned, in-train or proposed across industry and regulatory groups. We developed a capability-led approach to distil and segment raw stakeholder requirements into meaningful business requirements for the EESS platform.

Requirements were collated and classified by common themes, processes and functions to allow initial drafting of the BRD. The draft enabled legislative, regulator, and business requirements to be verified and validated.

We developed a robust, accurate, and logical method to document types of capabilities, functions, users, and business rules. This ensured the correct allocation of priorities to the different requirements.

Terra Firma gathered requirements that satisfied the regulatory needs of our client and were driven by legislation. We considered all aspects required for the selection, build and implementation of a technical platform, including people, process, data, technology, and information security.

The BRD documented the EESS platform scope, including constraints and assumptions. It provided platform context and capabilities, user and data context, and included EESS Platform Design Objectives. The BRD was presented to the EESS SCO and engagement Steering Committee for feedback and approval.