Welcome to my first Greater Sydney blog!

Hello everyone,

Welcome to my first Greater Sydney blog! It’s already been a couple of weeks since all of our teams came together to form our new division, though some of you moved in during May. I’ve been doing my best to meet as many teams as possible in that time, but with a division as big as ours (over 16,000 people) it’s very much an ongoing task! So, I thought I’d kick-off this blog to share my thinking with you and also a bit about what I’ve been up to.

Shaping Greater Sydney
I wanted to give you an update following our recent Executive team workshops and share some of the early ideas coming out of it.

It was a hugely productive morning and I think we all walked away agreeing that there are some great opportunities with where we plan to take our new division.

First up, we agreed on a draft purpose – and by that I mean what we really stand for as Greater Sydney division.

Our draft purpose is: Redefining integrated transport choices to improve lives, communities, and make Greater Sydney a better place to live, work and visit.

This might sound aspirational (it’s meant to be!) but it’s also very simple. This is really about looking at how we can make people’s lives easier and improving the liveability of local communities in Greater Sydney.

As many of us are customers ourselves, I’m sure we can all relate this. How good would it be if our modes, infrastructure and services worked seamlessly and intuitively together so that we could get home to our families and friends quicker at night? Or so we could easily access all the great places across Greater Sydney on weekends?

So, we started to break this down by looking at priorities for the next 12 months and some are clearly emerging… and just to be clear, these priorities do not take away from agency specific activities and business plans you are already working on. But what we have found is some focus areas that apply across our modes and places. As well as making immediate changes, they might also teach us new ways of working. These priorities include: Mode interchange – a focus on end-to-end journeys; improving community and stakeholder engagement; priority places; Safety; and whole-of-network performance.

Next steps

So, where to from here? On 29 July we’ll be getting together a broader group of leaders to consider our purpose further and talk about some new approaches to our stakeholder engagement. I will keep you posted on next steps after that.

One team, one dream

One of the really exciting things coming out of Greater Sydney, as demonstrated with the launch of Sydney Metro, is the way we are all working together to improve customers’ journeys.

Often we are so focused on getting a project to launch day that it’s easy to forget that there is a whole team behind the launch phase (after the project is built), to smooth out teething issues, monitor the transition period, and standing by to make tweaks along the way.

As part of a Greater Sydney approach, the Transport Coordination Office team has been busy supporting the Metro with teams out on the ground at each station precinct managing anything from car park and station access to congestion hot spots and incident management. The team has also been monitoring the bus network (along with the operators) to ensure on-time running for our customers. Of course, people wouldn’t have been able to get to the stations without the road infrastructure and supporting systems being in place from Sydney Roads.

Service planning has also played a key role in success of Metro, with the Services team setting up new on-demand trials and bus services to connect into Metro services. And of course our Sydney Trains team has been connecting in with Metro services by running additional services so at Chatswood our customers needed to wait no longer than three minutes for a connecting train.

This has been a fantastic Greater Sydney team effort to give our customers what they want. Thank you!

Out and about

I love speaking with our people so it was great to get down to Wollongong to attend the annual Maritime Operations and Compliance Branch Conference and meet some of the team that really are the face of Maritime out in our communities.

As I said on the day, I’m the first to admit coming in that there is a lot to learn about Maritime, but what I picked up very quickly is that you are an extremely passionate team and I believe that there is a real opportunity to share this energy and RMS Maritime’s strong customer service satisfaction record across our division and organisation.

Have a great week!

Elizabeth

Hello everyone,

Welcome to my first Greater Sydney blog! It’s already been a couple of weeks since all of our teams came together to form our new division, though some of you moved in during May. I’ve been doing my best to meet as many teams as possible in that time, but with a division as big as ours (over 16,000 people) it’s very much an ongoing task! So, I thought I’d kick-off this blog to share my thinking with you and also a bit about what I’ve been up to.

Shaping Greater Sydney
I wanted to give you an update following our recent Executive team workshops and share some of the early ideas coming out of it.

It was a hugely productive morning and I think we all walked away agreeing that there are some great opportunities with where we plan to take our new division.

First up, we agreed on a draft purpose – and by that I mean what we really stand for as Greater Sydney division.

Our draft purpose is: Redefining integrated transport choices to improve lives, communities, and make Greater Sydney a better place to live, work and visit.

This might sound aspirational (it’s meant to be!) but it’s also very simple. This is really about looking at how we can make people’s lives easier and improving the liveability of local communities in Greater Sydney.

As many of us are customers ourselves, I’m sure we can all relate this. How good would it be if our modes, infrastructure and services worked seamlessly and intuitively together so that we could get home to our families and friends quicker at night? Or so we could easily access all the great places across Greater Sydney on weekends?

So, we started to break this down by looking at priorities for the next 12 months and some are clearly emerging… and just to be clear, these priorities do not take away from agency specific activities and business plans you are already working on. But what we have found is some focus areas that apply across our modes and places. As well as making immediate changes, they might also teach us new ways of working. These priorities include: Mode interchange – a focus on end-to-end journeys; improving community and stakeholder engagement; priority places; Safety; and whole-of-network performance.

Next steps

So, where to from here? On 29 July we’ll be getting together a broader group of leaders to consider our purpose further and talk about some new approaches to our stakeholder engagement. I will keep you posted on next steps after that.

One team, one dream

One of the really exciting things coming out of Greater Sydney, as demonstrated with the launch of Sydney Metro, is the way we are all working together to improve customers’ journeys.

Often we are so focused on getting a project to launch day that it’s easy to forget that there is a whole team behind the launch phase (after the project is built), to smooth out teething issues, monitor the transition period, and standing by to make tweaks along the way.

As part of a Greater Sydney approach, the Transport Coordination Office team has been busy supporting the Metro with teams out on the ground at each station precinct managing anything from car park and station access to congestion hot spots and incident management. The team has also been monitoring the bus network (along with the operators) to ensure on-time running for our customers. Of course, people wouldn’t have been able to get to the stations without the road infrastructure and supporting systems being in place from Sydney Roads.

Service planning has also played a key role in success of Metro, with the Services team setting up new on-demand trials and bus services to connect into Metro services. And of course our Sydney Trains team has been connecting in with Metro services by running additional services so at Chatswood our customers needed to wait no longer than three minutes for a connecting train.

This has been a fantastic Greater Sydney team effort to give our customers what they want. Thank you!

Out and about

I love speaking with our people so it was great to get down to Wollongong to attend the annual Maritime Operations and Compliance Branch Conference and meet some of the team that really are the face of Maritime out in our communities.

As I said on the day, I’m the first to admit coming in that there is a lot to learn about Maritime, but what I picked up very quickly is that you are an extremely passionate team and I believe that there is a real opportunity to share this energy and RMS Maritime’s strong customer service satisfaction record across our division and organisation.

Have a great week!

Elizabeth

Page last updated: 25 Jul 2019, 04:08 PM