News & Insights
Rethinking How Regions Deliver BAU
Date
- 2025 December
Regional New Zealand delivers infrastructure under a very different set of pressures than the major projects that tend to dominate national discussions.
Funding is ring fenced, teams are lean and most of the real work sits in the constant cycle of BAU activity that keeps communities functioning. These are not headline builds. They are the renewals, upgrades, maintenance tasks and minor improvements that have immediate consequences when they slow down.
After twenty five years working with regional councils and local organisations, I’ve seen how easily this everyday delivery becomes harder than it needs to be. Decisions slow down, capability gets stretched and delivery partners often join once key choices are already locked in. Workstreams move one by one even though they rely on each other. These patterns show up across the regions and they limit the impact we can make.
There is a real opportunity to rethink how BAU is planned and delivered.
Involving the right experience at the front end helps steady scope and assumptions and reduces avoidable variation that slows progress later.
Bringing contractors into the conversation before scopes harden gives clearer insight into sequencing, access and constructability, which makes delivery smoother and more predictable.
Treating the pipeline as a connected programme rather than a set of isolated tasks helps reduce repeated disruption and makes limited regional budgets go further.
Grounding risk decisions in real operational knowledge gives teams a clearer sense of cost, time and disruption and supports steadier planning.
These shifts are simple but they consistently improve how BAU moves across the regions. They reduce fragmentation, steady planning, bring delivery partners into the right moments and create more predictable programmes for the communities who rely on them. When applied together and maintained over time, they help regional teams do more with the resources they already have and lift the value of the essential work that underpins everyday life.
If this reflects the challenges in your region, we are happy to talk through how these ideas can be applied in practice.
