Enhancing the User Experience
Dubbo Regional Council’s Journey to Resolve
Dubbo Regional Council
56,720
Susan Wade
For years, Dubbo Regional Council ran its meetings using static PDFs, attachments, and a maze of workarounds that “met the needs for a while, but were starting to get tired,” according to Governance Team Leader Susan Wade.
Before Resolve, her team spent hours managing formatting, merging attachments and manually bookmarking agendas to make sure councillors and the community could navigate the papers. And with councillor and community experience at the forefront, Susan knew something had to change.
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Better for Councillors, and the Community​​
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The move to Resolve at Dubbo was about more than making life easier for the governance team. It was about improving the experience for the people who rely on council information every day. For Susan, the priority was always clear.
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“My entire goal was to enhance the experience for our users - our councillors and the community. Our community is very active and engaged; they attend and watch and comment on our meetings, so we wanted to enhance the experience for them,” she explained.
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“Our previous meeting management solution only gave us the option to manually bookmark PDFs to allow people to find what they were looking for, and this would take us hours. With Resolve, this now happens automatically – making the process so much quicker for us and the overall experience better for the community.”
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“Our previous meeting management solution only gave us the option to manually bookmark PDFs to allow people to find what they were looking for, and this would take us hours. With Resolve, this now happens automatically – making the process so much quicker for us and the overall experience better for the community easier."​​​
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For Dubbo’s highly engaged community, being able to find exactly what they’re interested in, without digging through hundreds of pages or scrubbing through long videos, will prove to be a benefit in the long run.
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“People want to find the planning application, watch that moment in the stream, hear the discussion and see the vote. Now they can, all in one place.”
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Councillors have felt the benefits too. With the Councillor Portal, voting and navigating the agenda has become intuitive and familiar, making meetings run more smoothly without disrupting established ways of working.
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“In the past, councillors would end up with an agenda PDF and then a separate appendix. They used iPads, so trying to switch between two documents during a live meeting was clunky and frustrating. Now, there’s no more toggling between different PDFs just to find the right items. Now everything is available in one intuitive screen, with automatic updates that save us so much time and make meetings much easier to run.”
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“Now, there’s no more toggling between different PDFs just to find the right items. Now everything is available in one intuitive screen, with automatic updates that save us so much time and make meetings much easier to run."​​​
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The team at Dubbo created a 'How to Use Resolve' Instruction Video, making it easier for their community to participate.
Agendas in minutes, not hours.
One of the biggest operational improvements for Dubbo has been the speed and simplicity of running agendas. What was once a time-consuming, high-risk process is now something the team can do with confidence and ease.
“Agendas previously took us hours, and with Resolve, they take no time at all to run. If we need to change the order or update something, it’s just done,” she said. “I love that there’s one packet and everyone just looks at the same thing, and confidential reports are only visible to those who should see them.”
For Susan, this is a stark contrast to how things used to work, when every agenda was a juggling act of attachments, formatting and crossed fingers. When large or confidential attachments caused issues, the team often had no choice but to leave them out altogether, adding yet another layer of complexity to an already fragile process.
“We would proofread everything, append every report with the attachment and hope there wouldn’t be any glitches. Sometimes a file would be stored in the wrong place, and the agenda couldn’t pull it out, so we would have to stop the meeting and go looking for it. We no longer experience any of these issues; it all just works, giving the team real confidence in the process.”
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“We no longer experience any of these issues; it all just works, giving the team real confidence in the process."​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
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Confidence and Continuity
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Resolve has also helped Dubbo address a long-standing risk: relying on just one or two people to run council meetings. In the past, that kind of dependency created pressure and vulnerability whenever someone was away or unavailable.
“Everyone needs to know how to do it. You can’t cancel a council meeting because someone is sick,” Susan stated. “With Resolve, that risk has largely disappeared. The system is intuitive enough that team members can step in, pick things up quickly, and support each other when needed. It’s been a huge benefit.”
“The system is intuitive enough that team members can step in, pick things up quickly, and support each other when needed.”
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Winning over the team
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Like any major technology change, the move to Resolve came with a mix of excitement and nerves. For teams who live and breathe their existing systems, change can be daunting.
In Dubbo’s case, it was important to ensure all staff had buy-in and genuinely wanted to work with Resolve. Susan brought the team together to walk through the benefits, and the response was immediate.
“Our team was ready to complete pros and cons list, but one team member actually emailed me and said she couldn’t even find one con with Resolve. This was a big statement and became a turning point for the team.”
“One team member actually emailed me and said she couldn’t even find one con with Resolve. This was a big statement and became a turning point for the team.”
Managers, executive officers and report writers also began to see the value, especially those who had always struggled with the heavy formatting demands of Word.
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“We’ve got people who just hated Word,” she said. “They weren’t the type to sit there formatting documents all day; they just wanted to get their information in. Resolve removed that friction. They’ve been able to just get in and do their report. One of them said, ‘I haven’t procrastinated, I just got in and got my report done. Love it. It’s so good.’”
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For Susan, that shift in attitude was just as important as the technology itself.
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A Collaborative Go-Live, Built on Partnership
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The partnership between Team Redman and Dubbo Council continued right through go-live, with an implementation that was intensive and highly collaborative.
As Susan explained, “We had twice-weekly meetings with Team Redman. They really understood what we needed because every council is different,” and that support extended into Dubbo’s first two live meetings, where the team was supported in real time. “Having the team support us during the meetings was huge. We didn’t feel like we’d just been handed the system and left. It really feels like true support, not ‘see you later’ after go-live,” Susan said.
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“We didn’t feel like we’d just been handed the system and left. It really feels like true support, not ‘see you later’ after go-live.”
With Resolve now embedded, Dubbo is already exploring new ways to strengthen transparency, including live-stream overlays that show votes in real time.
“Our community really cares about seeing votes. With Resolve, we can finally give them that context, what item was voted on, what the result was, and when it happened.” She summed it up simply: “Yes, there are always little things to learn, but we’re comfortable and confident now. And we know the support is there if we need it.”
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