“ By the time COVID-19 arrived PM-Partners had started training our IT resilience group in agile ways of working and helping us change mindsets ”
— Simona Dimovski , Chief Information Officer , Sutherland Shire Council ( SSC )
ideology that the team is the greatest asset she has as a leader . Empowering the team to agility and lean ways of working was paramount for the success that was to be achieved during the accelerated COVID-19 response at the council . “ In recent years , my team has not had much opportunity for external training , they were invigorated by the new agile concepts , the fast turnaround time , the delivery of value in increments , the radical transparency and the dissolution of traditional hierarchical structures of working ,” she says .
By the time of Dimovski ’ s arrival at the organisation , SSC had already fixed on a ‘ cloud-first ’ strategy for any new implementations , and much progress has been made even during the pandemic exigency . For example , a new booking system and a new project portfolio management ( PPM ) system currently being built will reside in the cloud , and of course MS Teams is also cloud based . “ We are going to reassess all our on-prem software platforms ,” she notes . “ In the past a full migration had been thought too expensive , but IT ’ s value proposition going forward won ’ t be just about the back-office operations , rather it will be about the specialist knowledge we bring to the business as a whole .”
The PMO approach she had previously followed at Ausgrid was something that Dimovski also aimed to pursue at the council . “ I wanted to overview every piece of work whether in the pipeline , on hold , in flight or requested so we could work out the sequencing through portfolio prioritisation and partner with our business on what really needed to be done given the resources we had . This level of governance was novel to IT , and a Portfolio governance Committee was born as a result . We knew there
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