HydraCo Australia Pty Ltd

Hydra Consulting is a South Australian boutique consultancy supporting effective growth and project delivery. We work across a range of sectors providing specialist expertise in policy development and implementation, water planning, implementation planning, project governance, development of science-driven policy and collaborative teaming. We have been highly successful in supporting government to develop effective policy, implement that policy and to manage the science behind that policy. Our work on the Southeast Water Science review (consisting of 70 people from 20 companies delivering on time and on budget in just 4 months) resulted in world first regulation of abstracted water in forestry. We managed the South Australian response to the Murray Darling Basin Plan, managing the development of the policy science review that resulted in increased water allocations for South Australia under the Plan. We developed the processes used in South Australia for the implementation of highly complex water policy projects in the Mount Lofty Ranges. We successfully ran a unique public engagement process through a design competition to identify community solutions to infrastructure implementation for Low Flow management in the Adelaide Hills.

We are undertaking business development for two new Australian bottled water company?s including assessing regulatory and health requirements. The overall type of projects we have been involved in in the water space include: Water policy implementation planning; water policy science project management; water policy science development; project management reviews; building systems for organisations to develop project management systems and procedures; approval process design and re-engineering; capital project reviews; community engagement through design competition; building and managing multi-national project teams; project governance; project and organisational performance, policy governance, organisational governance. Outside of water, we have extensive experience in the application of new big data approaches to customer engagement, including use of internet media scraping, which we have been pioneering in the wine industry for understanding brand engagement and social sentiment. We track people movements through regions to assess how areas are used in real life and understand carrying capacity and human behaviour, with a focus on tourism. We also have a GIS-based service that we can use to run citizen science and community engagement projects that have a focus on place using a very simple phone interface. Finally, we also provide a service that helps understand how places are used and provide user-interactive information on places from data sources that are rarely utilised; developed for natural resource and tourism regions. We have also recently developed a biosecurity management system that creates an engagement platform that includes geographically-based data management, database search-based communication protocols, citizen science interface and machine data collection to create a powerful integrated database that will allow for the creation of landscape-based understanding of biosecurity risk.

Organisational Capability

• Water policy implementation planning
• Governance
• Water policy science project management
• Community engagement through design competition
• Building and managing multi-national project teams
• Approval process design, development, review and re-engineering
• Organisational restructuring with an emphasis on effective project management and project delivery
• Reviews of performance of large science and capital infrastructure delivery projects

Projects

Client: Natural Resources SA Murray-Darling Basin BoardProject: Community engagement competition,Business process reengineering: Managed Aquifer Recharge,Development of Eastern Mount Lofty Ranges Water Planning Implementation Plan,Development of Project
Development of a unique competition to engage the Adelaide Hills community in the design of infrastructure works. The contract included designing the competition, marketing the competition, legals, developing the prizes, running the competition, social media and supporting a prize ceremony. In developing the prizes, we were able to secure field trial space for winners which have been successfully run and have contributed simpler management options that were achieved by a separate technical tendering process. We have submitted a paper to OzWater about this unique, successful stakeholder engagement approach.,Darren managed the re-engineering of all approval processes for Managed Aquifer Recharge in South Australia. This involved mapping of all current processes, establishing a desired �future state� and re-mapping all approval processes. Approximately 8 steps were removed from the approval process.,This project was conducted with a team from Science Monitoring and Knowledge Branch, Customer and Corporate Services Branch and Water and Climate Change Branch of the Department of Water Environment and Natural Resources. A new approach to water planning implementation was developed, including the development of governance structures and a new approach to project planning and approaching water planning implementation strategically. The project involved working with a project committee, supporting the committee in reporting to steering committee and consulting with agency staff as required. (Circa 20 staff involved in project) The team delivered a pilot implementation plan that included a framework document (Benefits, outcomes, risks, engagement, success, completion and governance) and Projects (outline of all of the projects necessary to achieve the implementation).,This project, conduced for the Department of Environment, Water and Natural Resources Science Unit, focussed on the development of a new structure for project management under newly implemented partnership arrangements. The project involved Dr Darren Oemcke managing: � A series of workshops to identify strategic drivers of project management practices, core competencies and approaches to partnering. � Preliminary Journey Mapping of the relationships of SMK with their major partners. � Development of workflows for project management. � Development of procedures for project management, documentation and procurement. � Development of processes for effective engagement.,We were engaged to manage a Science Review of Forestry Water Allocation Planning. The project has a $400,000 budget and 4 months to complete. Our role was to ensure on-time and on-budget delivery. The project delivered on-time and on-budget with over 70 people ranging from scientists to printers to deliver the project in time. The project management role included all budget tracking, selection of support sub-contractors, developing work packages and working with teams and individuals to find ways to deliver the work packages on time. This project resulted in world-first legislation regulating the utilisation of water by forestry.,We prepared a value chain study of the Northern Adelaide Plains horticulture industry including sector interviews, reviews of historical supply chain studies, review of supply chain performance and development of a value chain gap analysis. The outcomes were the identification of inhibitors to growth in export in the region, including lack of strategic cohesion in the region resulting in an overly competitive domestic market and poorly understood export opportunities, lack of knowledge of each others success and the potential high-value export opportunities, a need for improved market-driven product development and value added processing.