Where an IT services COO earns the client's trust

Torvelle's desks handle about 2.3 million contacts a year for fourteen government agencies and nine enterprise clients, roughly 410,000 users in all. Most of our contracts carry service credits, deductions from the monthly fee when we miss an agreed service level, and most service levels were written around speed: calls answered within a set time, tickets closed within a set number of hours. Speed matters, but a desk can meet every speed measure while users ring back about the same fault. Since 2022 our primary internal measure has been the share of tickets resolved and still resolved ten days later, read beside users' own ratings of the outcome. We report both to clients every month, including when they are worse than the contracted measures would suggest. I also plan desk capacity around the predictable peaks of public-sector work, such as the end of the financial year, school-term starts and the week a new payment system goes live.

Our 2,100 offshore colleagues do different work in different places for practical reasons. Manila and Cebu sit two hours behind Brisbane, so they carry voice and chat support for enterprise clients during Australian business hours. Pune is four and a half hours behind, which suits testing, application maintenance and work that can be handed over at the end of an Australian day. I lived in Manila for five and a half years, and I design offshore work on three questions: what people are measured on, what they are permitted to fix and how much context comes with the ticket. Attrition is the other constant. The Philippine outsourcing labour market is deep and competitive, so I fund technical career paths, team-leader training and clear promotion rules rather than relying on pay alone. Manila attrition fell from 41 to 23 per cent after the 2022 redesign. Continuity planning has to assume typhoons, floods and power interruptions as ordinary events.

About 1,600 of our people hold Australian Government security clearances at the level their contracts require, sponsored through the Commonwealth's vetting arrangements. Several of our clients, including water and energy businesses and hospitals, are responsible entities under the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act 2018, as expanded in 2021 and 2022. Their risk-management programmes must address cyber, personnel, supply-chain and physical hazards, and we are part of their supply chain. Our two leased hosting halls bring obligations of their own. Since 2024 privileged changes for government and critical-infrastructure clients are made only by cleared engineers in Australia, through just-in-time access from managed workstations with every session recorded. Restricting administrative privileges is one of the Essential Eight mitigation strategies in Australian Government cyber security guidance, and our clients test us against it. I am not the company's security officer; my part is to make the operating model match what the security team and our contracts say it should be.

I hold a formal right of veto over any bid whose delivery plan I cannot sign. Since 2023 every opportunity above A$50 million reaches the board with a staffing plan before a price: the hours the service needs, the utilisation it assumes, the clearances required and how long they will realistically take, the transition timetable and our position on liability and service credits. Australian procurement rules make value for money, not the lowest price, the test, yet evaluations still reward an attractive price, so a supplier's own discipline has to supply the restraint. Transitions are where good bids fail. We have taken over nine contracts since 2021; seven went live on the agreed date and two were late, one by three weeks because clearances for 40 staff took longer than our plan allowed. Our transition plans now start clearance applications for named people before contract signature wherever the client agrees.

Our 780 field engineers work from 23 regional bases and drive about 21 million kilometres a year between hospitals, schools, water plants and council offices. Under work health and safety laws Torvelle must manage the risks of that work so far as is reasonably practicable, and fatigue from long days, driving and night on-call is among the most serious of them. Officers, including directors, carry their own due-diligence duty. Since 2025 we plan field work at a 78 per cent billable utilisation rate, cap combined working and driving time at twelve hours with a ten-hour break before the next shift, and limit on-call to four consecutive nights. Vehicle telematics show us driving time, not speed league tables. The right-to-disconnect provisions added to the Fair Work Act in 2024 also prompted us to write down which out-of-hours contact belongs to a paid on-call roster and which does not, which proved overdue.