Bellingen Shire Council had repeated frustrations with their existing agenda and business paper software. It was particularly unreliable when accessed remotely, version controls were a challenge, and users had difficulty searching across multiple business papers.
All these challenges had been causing inefficiencies for the General Manager and staff for quite some time and to make matters worse, the solution was no longer compatible with the current operating platform. So, the team at Bellingen started looking for a replacement solution with the intention of replacing the software prior to the local government elections originally scheduled for September 2020.
A chance meeting with Network sponsor, Redman Solutions, at an IT conference at the end of 2019 brought CivicClerk into the mix and when council started having more and more issues with their existing software, they arranged a demonstration. The team loved what they saw and with an estimated implementation plan over 7-16 weeks, they had plenty of time to figure out when they would kick off the project... and then the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
Suddenly the team at Bellingen had to accommodate councillors "Zooming" in for council meetings as well as live streaming whilst still dealing with the headaches caused by the existing business paper software that could not be easily compiled by remote workers.
That is when the team at Redman Solutions suggested a rapid deployment of CivicClerk to be done remotely due to lock down restrictions. The team at Bellingen were thinking, 'This is not the best time to implement a new system'… but as it turned out could not have been a better time.
The upshot of the situation was that instead of the usual three-month face to face process the implementation was achieved in 35 days! Everything was done remotely including Councillor training, with a successful go live Council meeting held on 27 May 2020.
You can also read about how the team at Thames-Coromandel District Council gained efficiencies that equated to one annual full-time equivalent (FTE) worth of time and productivity being freed up across the team when they implemented CivicClerk.