People, Personalities, Partners, and Projects: The SYSTRA experience in collaboration

SYSTRA ANZ’s mission is to be there where it matters; on the complex projects with the greatest impact, providing the innovative solutions that will shape the future of our communities. To achieve this, we count on all our employees - people who share our values, our commitments, and who innovate with passion.
Two of SYSTRA’s key business leaders, Helen Williams and Andrew Waye, will provide insights from their experience in how to maximise cooperation and collaboration across people, personalities, and partnerships.

To achieve success, contemporary projects demand strong leadership and influence over a range of intertwined people, personalities, and partnerships. Collaborations are fundamentally human in nature, needing human efforts to be nurtured to help achieve the collective purpose. Project complexity is often linked to non-rational human factors like biases, communications and organisational politics, rather than the rational technical and engineering aspects which are complicated in comparison.

The realities of the current and future work environment include:

• The complexity of relationship-webs that form in Australia. Our small population combined with geographic vastness creates a series of business and cultural hubs characterised by deep-seated interconnectedness and belonginess.

• Reliance on co-located teams increasingly reflects a “last century” approach since the pandemic. The workforce now is technology enabled, and comes with a work-any-time, work-any-place, attitude. Yet, remote teams must remain strategically aligned on the right work at the right time.

• Project resource needs are becoming increasingly complicated through skill shortages significantly exacerbated through the emergence of more professional specialisations. There are increasing demands for collaboration across borders. We must work with other organisations, and with our global SYSTRA teams, to leverage into a bigger workforce capacity and capability than we hold ourselves.

SYSTRA endeavours to deliver projects with our clients and partners by leveraging from our core value of Connected Teams. Ensuring the right human elements are designed into the project management system is just as important as designing elements into the actual products and outputs to enable client benefits. We work hard to ensure our project teams remain aligned while fostering relationships that achieve project objectives and deliver value to the business and the client. And while that can be hard on any project, it is always more challenging to work with others to achieve synergetic collaboration.