Our clients are two sister Victorian government departments that operationally share resources to achieve their objectives. One department aims to ensure Victorians are safe and healthy, while the other department aims to create a more inclusive society where people feel safe and partake equally.

The departments use a custom, SharePoint-based briefing and correspondence system. As part of an effort to reduce costs, the Executive Director of Shared Services wanted to understand how the in-house system compared to systems used by counterpart departments.

A report was to be delivered to the Executive Director within two weeks. It required detailing on how the system compared to other available systems and the impact to cost.

Terra Firma devised a framework for evaluating the systems at three partner departments, which would quantitatively measure the capabilities of a particular system against the in-place system.

Initially, Terra Firma worked with the system owner and stakeholders to identify partner departments to measure against. Given the tight timeline, Terra Firma prioritised setting up showcases with partner departments with the assistance of the department.

Terra Firma developed a quantitative framework with which to measure the capabilities of alternative systems. This was constructed by workshopping the current system and understanding its core capabilities, as well as planned functionality which would be available soon.

During the showcases, the department was requested to demonstrate their system following the regular workflow from initiating the creation of a briefing through to the final approval/sign off and archiving of the briefing. Terra Firma evaluated the product during the demonstration.

Once our evaluation was complete, we put together a report detailing the findings of the analysis and an explanation for the current running costs of the system.

Terra Firma was able to successfully deliver and present the report within the allotted timeframe, displaying that the current system’s capabilities were far beyond those at partner departments.

The analysis determined that the running costs of the system were in line with what it would cost partner departments to run their systems at similar capability levels.