We hope you are all going well and that business is thriving for all our clients as we continue to navigate our way through this new environment. The recent budget announcements from all levels of government have been very positive around infrastructure projects and the need to continue to invest in building infrastructure that meets the needs of our communities and delivers public value.

Given this, we have had many enquiries recently around our teams’ capacity to provide additional services across both Australia and New Zealand, and our plans in returning to face to face delivery. The focus of this newsletter is to provide you with an insight into some of our most commonly requested services, introduce you to our newest team member and to reinforce that our priority is always focused on ensuring a best for client/project approach with regards to a mix of online or face to face delivery of our services.  We have missed our face to face interactions with our clients and look forward to doing this more over the remainder of 2021.

As more infrastructure projects are being announced across Australia and New Zealand, there is an increasing need to position your organisation, people and teams to bid to win and not participate.  One of the critical pieces of the bid wining puzzle is to appoint a bid coach that knows your clients, your industry and can help coach your team to success.

A good bid coach can help you and your team in the following areas:

We have had some new faces join our bid coaching team at BRS over the past 12 months. They are all outstanding bid coaches who can assist both face to face and virtually depending on what is required.  We would love to talk to you early in your bid pursuit process around your coaching needs to ensure we can position your team for success.

BRS are undertaking a lot of training at the moment particularly in the collaborative contracting space such as Early Contractor Involvement (ECI) and Alliancing.  In particular, we are finding that a number of our clients are moving to an Alliance procurement model and require their people, supply chain partners and other stakeholders to be trained in all aspects of working in an Alliance environment. This training is so important in ensuring that you educate and train your staff on the mindset shift required under a collaborative contract as well as the tools and frameworks that each procurement model drives.

Some of the recent training we have been undertaking either face to face or virtually in this space includes:

• Alliance 101 training
• Early Contractor Involvement training
• Owner Interface Manager (OIM) training
• PAB/ALT and AMT training centred around how to be effective in these roles
•  PAB/ALT/AMT summits setting up the governance and foundations of your Alliance
• Team and leadership workshops

Setting your team up for success starts with them being educated on what you are trying to achieve and how they need to go about it.  Please come back to us should you wish to talk through your training needs specific to your project and particular procurement model.

We have now been using our Learning Management System (LMS) for over two years and it is really exciting to see how many of our clients have embraced the technology and how this has changed their organisations approach to learning. Not only has our LMS been a terrific resource and repository of information that supports the online learning experience, but as we return to having face to face as a delivery option, our clients see the value in utilising our system and choose to continue to provide this as part of their workshop/training experience.

For those followers who aren’t familiar with our LMS, this is an online portal that we use to support our online and face to face training programs providing resources, videos and other tools to support learning post a workshop or coaching experience with BRS.

Our typical LMS set up includes access to:

• workshop / training agenda
• pre-reading materials
• workshop / training slides
• recording of the sessions that you can view post the workshop
• relevant client and BRS templates, tools and articles
• quiz surveys to test the participant’s learning
• certificates of completion for workshops
• interactive forums for Q&A between participants and the facilitator

The simplicity of our LMS and ease of use, provides a flexible option for our clients to have a shared space to ensure the participants make the most of their learning experience.

Another benefit of how we use our LMS is that once you have run a pilot program we can replicate this workshop/training experience for other groups, whilst allowing all participants from all courses to collaborate and share ideas using the interactive forums we have set up in the LMS.  This is a game changer in promoting collaboration and knowledge sharing across all training participants.

The most in demand area of our services for the use of the LMS has been our commercial capability training programs.  We are now running a range of commercial capability training programs both face to face with LMS support and virtually in the following areas across Australia and New Zealand for State and Local Government agencies as well as consultants and contractors which include the following areas:

• Graduate Commercial Capability training
• Intermediate and Advanced Commercial Capability training
• Tender Evaluation Team training
• Interactive Workshop Preparation training
• Procurement Chair Tender Evaluation training
• Owner Interface training
• Alliance 101 training
• Early Contractor Involvement training
• ALT and AMT training

BRS has written many blogs over the years over the importance of building commercial capability in your organisation whether you are an infrastructure delivery agency, contractor or consultant working in all areas of infrastructure. To review these blogs, you can find them on our website at https://www.brsresults.com/blog/

For an interactive demonstration on how this training works and can be tailored to suit your organisation or project requirements, please do not hesitate to contact BRS to discuss further.

We continue to grow our team to help support our clients, and we are delighted to announce the addition of Brett Murphy as an Associate to the team.  Brett brings over 25 years of portfolio, program and project advisory experience within the consulting, electricity, gas, wine and IT industries.  Brett is passionate about harnessing the combined power of people, process and technology and ensuring that his clients have the right strategy, systems and solutions in place in order to deliver continuous business performance improvement.

Most recently Brett has been leading the implementation of a new Export Label Image Search System (ELISS) for Wine Australia, which will be publicly launched on 1 July to strengthen the integrity of Australian wine labels and to make it easier for brand owners to detect potentially fraudulent activity. Previously he was the General Manager for Wine Australia’s Export and Regional Wine Support Package – a $50 million program of Australian wine and craft cider marketing in international markets, wine export and tourism grants and capability building programs – and the CIO.

Brett also spent a significant period of time working in a utility infrastructure organisation responsible for the setup of a project management office as well as working in a range of project delivery leadership roles.

Brett’s key areas of expertise are strategy and business improvement, solution strategy, selection and implementation, portfolio governance and control, stakeholder and change management.

On the weekend you are most likely to find Brett at his boys many sporting activities, on the squash court/in the gym or recovering in the family’s new swim spa. He loves pretty much any sport, especially cricket, and being actively involved with coaching and helping out the boys’ clubs and teams. He is also passionate about supporting Australia’s fine wine community!

For more information on Brett and what skills he brings to our team please go to our team page on our website at the following link: https://www.brsresults.com/our-team/

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