Shire shake-up ongoing

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Shire shake-up ongoing

A NEW department and role have come out of the South Gippsland Shire Council’s organisational restructure with the final proposal presented to staff last Tuesday.

For the past three weeks council staff have been involved in consultations to discuss the proposed restructure.

Council CEO Tim Tamlin said consultation went extremely well.

“The major change to the proposed structure is the creation of a new department called sustainable communities and infrastructure,” he said.

The new department will bring together the property management, sustainability and community strengthening teams and will work with the previous engineering services team.

“By bringing them all together in one place the community has to go through less red tape to get things done. It is the biggest change from the draft proposal,” Mr Tamlin said.

The restructure also created the new position of design engineer.

“Previously, we used consultants to do minor designs like small road works. By employing someone ourselves, our analysis shows it will save us $30,000 a year,” Mr Tamlin said.

The restructure will still result in the loss of just half a fulltime position.

Management roles will be reduced from 23 to 13 and directorates from four to three and managers and coordinators roles have reduced by half.

The CEO said the new structure wasn’t about cutting costs as far as staff goes, it was about restructuring functions to grow efficiencies faster than normal.

“There is provision for a position to look after business improvement, with the idea of looking at each and every one of our services and making them more effective,” he said.

“By using online software to assist with grant applications, we have reduced the role in the office by half. We used to have one person full time doing grants, now that same person can do that job in two to three days a week.”

Mr Tamlin said the council will be introducing more advanced software to streamline previously time consuming processes.

Council’s imminent new website will allow ratepayers to conduct more council business online, thereby avoiding the need for some staff to handle payments and enquiries, such as for planning permit applications.

“There are two types of restructure, one is to save money and cut out jobs,” Mr Tamlin said.

“In the long run that will hurt you, because then you are not left with enough people to work smarter. This restructure is about working smarter, being more effective and providing value for the community.”

Mr Tamlin said the council’s former structure was taking into account more traditional local government approaches.

“The way we are structuring now is to take advantage of technology and smarter ways of working through systems and processes, helping our customers connect with our business,” he said.

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Posted by on May 26 2015. Filed under Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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