In 2018 the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) initiated a major organisational transformation program to ensure the agency was best positioned to meet its future objectives. The transformational change being undertaken at ARENA was designed and implemented through three large-scale projects focused on each of the key components of transformation, with work to be undertaken across three geographically dispersed sites.

In undertaking a program of transformation of this size and scope, ARENA recognised that a key enabler of success of the program would be the ability to influence and change behaviours across the organisation to maximise the benefits of the program.

Pragma was engaged to lead this complex program of change across ARENA. We developed a comprehensive program to effectively plan and communicate expectations, update process documentation, provide best practice training, and create and maintain performance management processes.

Our change management activities included vision, discovery and awareness workshops across the organisation, synthesised through interviews, developing deep contextual understanding of change-drivers. This critically set priorities for a newly-established cross-functional delivery team responsible for business and enabling changes.

Pragma defined the approach and continued to provide ARENA executive with strategic advice, service design-(as-a-Service), executive coaching and implementation support.The learnings from the vision workshops were consolidated into an ARENA Future State Vision poster. This artefact was key to the management of change, it created the buy in required for staff to feel a sense of ownership over the change program and it was printed in large format and placed in offices across the country.

Additional plan-on-a-page artefacts were developed to enable staff to gain quick insight into individual packages of work being delivered through a set of highly visual and communicative artefacts.

The successful delivery of change management activities was a critical success factor in the organisation’s transformation, promoting buy-in with staff and contributing to the building of a service-excellence culture across ARENA.