Chief Human Resources Officer / Australia
Three people decisions and what they cost
- Company revenue
- A$238m
- Year to 30 June 2026
- Employees
- 910
- Adelaide, Darwin and Canberra
- Security-cleared staff
- 146
- Up from 61 in 2022
Decisions & consequences
01Sponsoring clearances for our own engineers instead of renting cleared contractors
In early 2024 we were preferred bidder for a five-year, A$14.6 million contract to host an engineering environment for a defence supplier. The customer required 18 administrators holding a Negative Vetting 1 clearance by the go-live date. We had six. The sales director proposed hiring cleared contractors, available within weeks at day rates around A$1,350, and meeting the original date. His view was reasonable.
I argued for growing the capability inside the company. Contractors would cost more than A$5 million over a year, would leave when a better rate appeared, and would tell our own engineers that cleared work was something we bought rather than offered. The trade-off was time. Sponsored clearances would take months, and we would need to ask the customer for a later start. The chief executive supported a mixed approach, and the sales director accepted it with clear reservations.
We invited volunteers and received 40 expressions of interest. Nine could not be nominated because they were not citizens. I met each of them to explain the rule and to agree a development plan for senior roles outside the cleared team. After manager review we sponsored 26 engineers, engaged seven cleared contractors for nine months and negotiated a go-live eleven weeks later than first proposed. That delay moved about A$900,000 of revenue into the following year. Cleared roles received an allowance of A$5,500 a year.
Twenty-one nominations were granted, with a median of seven months. Two engineers withdrew and three were still waiting when the contractors left. Contractor spending was A$2.1 million. Two newly cleared engineers later left for defence primes, as we expected.The company now has 146 cleared staff and has bid for two further contracts that we could not have staffed in 2023.
What I would do differently is start nominations as soon as the bid looked likely, not after preferred-bidder status. I would also tell interested colleagues about the citizenship requirement in the first message, not after they had volunteered.
Redeploying service-desk analysts after an AI assistant took first-line tickets
In February 2025 we introduced an AI assistant that handled password resets, account unlocks and simple access requests for our managed-service customers. Within six months first-line ticket volume reaching people fell by 38 per cent. The service desk employed 74 analysts. The finance team's model proposed reducing the desk by 30 roles and saving A$2.4 million a year from the next quarter. The chief financial officer saw no reason to pay people for work that had disappeared.
I did not dispute that the desk would be smaller. I disputed the speed and the method. Our enterprise agreement requires consultation on major change, and the people leaving the desk knew our customers' systems better than any new hire. We also had unfilled level-two support and network-operations vacancies that were costing us overtime. I proposed a paid 20-week conversion route into those roles, voluntary redundancy for analysts who preferred to leave and no forced redundancies in the first round. The chief executive accepted a lower first-year saving.
We consulted analysts and delegates for six weeks before confirming the plan. Nineteen analysts entered the conversion route, eight took voluntary redundancy and the desk settled at 47. The one-off cost was A$1.7 million, split between training wages and redundancy payments. The first-year saving was A$1.1 million, not A$2.4 million.
Seventeen of the 19 completed the conversion and remain in their new roles; two left the company. Overtime in network operations fell by a third. Two ticket categories went back to people after three months: account unlocks for a health network's clinical staff during night shifts, and after-hours calls from remote mine sites, where callers needed a human who understood the site's radio and satellite links.
What I would do differently is ask analysts to help decide which tickets the assistant should handle before it went live. They predicted both failures during consultation, but by then the configuration had already been agreed with the vendor.
Ending single-person night shifts at our Darwin data centre
Until 2023 our Darwin data centre was staffed overnight by one critical-facilities technician, supported by remote monitoring from Adelaide and an on-call engineer. During a wet-season storm in January 2023, a cooling-plant fault coincided with a power disturbance. The technician on duty worked alone for most of a fifteen-hour shift while the on-call engineer was delayed by flooded roads. No customer system failed and nobody was hurt.The technician resigned three weeks later.
Our psychosocial risk assessment had listed isolation and fatigue for Darwin, but the controls were monitoring and a phone number. The operations director preferred better remote tooling and a faster call-out arrangement, which would cost about A$180,000. The chief financial officer questioned whether a site that had never suffered an outage needed more people. I argued that the hazard was already present every night, and that our evidence was a resignation rather than an injury only by luck.
The executive approved two-person overnight cover from July 2023. We recruited five more technicians, moved Darwin to a five-crew rotating roster of twelve-hour shifts and capped consecutive night shifts at four. The additional cost was A$760,000 a year. The trade-off fell partly on the technicians: overtime had been a substantial part of their income, and the average Darwin technician lost about A$9,800 a year in overtime. Several delegates opposed the change for that reason, and we agreed a twelve-month transition payment through consultation.
In the following year overtime hours at Darwin fell by 44 per cent, unplanned leave fell by a third and turnover dropped from 29 per cent to 12 per cent. One experienced technician resigned because of the lost income, and I understand why. We now apply the same minimum overnight staffing rule at both Adelaide sites.
What I would do differently is design the roster with technicians before taking it to delegates. The overtime loss was predictable, and those who would bear it should have shaped the transition from the start.