When people talk about innovation in the water industry, the conversation often turns to emerging treatment technologies, digital platforms or advanced materials.
For Jane Espie, the newly appointed Water Market Leader for Victoria at GHD, innovation can be something much simpler.
It can be about getting people to work together differently.
Speaking on the Inside Water podcast, Espie argued that some of the most significant opportunities facing the sector are not necessarily tied to breakthrough technologies. Instead, they sit within the processes and relationships that underpin project delivery.
“I think innovation sometimes can be a little bit of a dirty word, or it gets thrown around quite a bit,” Espie said.
“I think sometimes it doesn’t necessarily need to be the hero project, or the sexy ceramic membrane, or something like that.”
“I think one of the biggest opportunities is some of the slightly less sexy, boring kind of, but very powerful stuff around process and collaboration.”
Why water projects are becoming harder to deliver
The pressure on water utilities continues to grow.
Victoria’s water authorities are balancing ageing infrastructure, population growth, climate variability, customer affordability concerns and increasing regulatory expectations. At the same time, the cost of delivering infrastructure continues to rise.
Espie believes the challenge is not a lack of expertise.
Instead, the sector must become better at translating ideas into outcomes.
“I think one of the biggest challenges is that translation,” she said.
“We’ve got a lot of amazingly smart people who are working on all of these challenges.”
“But then translation from the thinking and the sort of the high-level innovation into what we’re delivering on the ground day to day, I think, is one of the biggest challenges.”
The result can be delays, duplicated effort and missed opportunities to improve project outcomes.
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Breaking down silos across the project lifecycle
Espie sees an opportunity to better align planning, delivery, operations and asset management teams.
She argues that project teams often become constrained by organisational boundaries and traditional ways of working.
“I think we’ve got a real opportunity to kind of get that better alignment between planning, delivery, operations, asset management, and then the downstream infrastructure market, whether that be consultants or contractors, to just deliver better and more efficiently,” she said.
The impact can be significant.
Espie pointed to the increasing financial consequences of project delays.
“Even just in inflation alone, if you delay that project by a year, you’ve got to come up with $5 million in savings, probably,” she said, referring to a hypothetical $100 million infrastructure project.
Those additional costs ultimately affect both utilities and customers.
Collaboration in practice
The concept of collaboration is widely discussed across the infrastructure sector. Espie believes the challenge is turning that aspiration into a practical delivery model.
Over the past five years, she has worked with Victorian water authorities on a range of collaborative delivery approaches, including South East Water’s Integrated Planning and Delivery model.
For Espie, successful collaboration requires organisations to move beyond their traditional comfort zones.
“We all talk about how we want to be able to collaborate better,” she said.
“But how do we actually do it in a way that actually makes more sense?”
That often means bringing together clients, consultants and contractors much earlier in the project lifecycle.
It can also require organisations to accept greater uncertainty as they explore new approaches.
“When we can kind of pull these people together and make them a bit more uncomfortable, we get a much better outcome,” Espie said.
Creating room to experiment
One of the advantages of a program-based delivery model is the ability to test and refine ideas over time.
Rather than relying on a single project to deliver transformational change, organisations can trial new approaches across a broader portfolio of work.
“If you try something in year one, it might fail, and year two, it might fail, but by the time you get to 10 years, you might have a completely new way of doing things,” Espie said.
The lessons may be technical, operational or community-focused.
They might involve new materials, alternative construction methods or small changes that improve the customer experience.
The important factor is creating an environment where innovation can move from concept to delivery.
For Espie, that shift may prove more valuable than any individual technology.
As utilities face increasing pressure to deliver more infrastructure with limited resources, the ability to collaborate effectively could become one of the sector’s most important competitive advantages.
This article is based on Episode 2 of the Inside Water podcast featuring Jane Espie, GHD’s Water Market Leader for Victoria. Listen to the full conversation for further discussion on the people, projects and delivery challenges shaping Victoria’s water sector, from collaborative delivery and innovation to regional resilience and workforce development.
