Our facilitation experience goes across all industry sectors in Australia and overseas.
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We teach what we practice through professional development training and mentoring.

Best performance and best decision-making occurs when team members are acting based on a shared knowledge and understanding of the issues, problems, challenges and risks that the situation or project entails.  It is equally important for the identification, analysis and selection of the options and solutions that will deliver best value for money outcomes.

Shared knowledge and understanding does not come from simply following processes and attending meetings – it requires conscious effort and facilitated events where information is shared and clarified, values defined, objectives made clear, ideas generated and tested, recommendations and decisions made enabling all to act with greater confidence and effectiveness.

ACVM’s team is about helping you and your organisation do these things.

PROFESSIONAL FACILITATION

The learned and practiced skills to manage and promote a groups’ capacity to understand competing perspectives, innovate, solve problems and achieve consensus on the way forward is a core capacity and service provided by ACVM.

VALUE MANAGEMENT & VALUE ENGINEERING

A structured facilitation process which builds on the various functions that underpin the topic at hand. Value Management, as a process, when effectively managed and facilitated can be applied to virtually any situation whether it be a project, business re-engineering, system refinement or strategic planning direction. ACVM has 6 registered VM facilitators.

ASSET MANAGEMENT & STRATEGIC ASSET PLANS

ACVM assists organisations to establish and operate a framework, skills and processes to plan and effectively manage assets strategically that can confidently be seen as required to support key business functions and directions.

RISK MANAGEMENT

ACVM facilitates the identification and consideration of potential risks to the success of a venture and creates an environment where management strategies can be identified and developed to address the aspects which demonstrate unacceptable levels of risk in either potential or implications.

STRATEGIC PLANNING

ACVM works with multi-stakeholder groups to respond to the challenges of thinking ahead, thinking strategically and responding to key issues such as resources, change, threats, business opportunities and growth in a structured, non-adversarial manner. Strategic Planning is all too often the key activity that business leaders tend to avoid allocating the necessary time or resources – ACVM make the process enjoyable.

COMMUNITY & STAKEHOLDER CONSULTATION

ACVM apply our core professional facilitation skills to make the increasing levels of community participation in the development and review of technical solutions more satisfying for all stakeholders. The community gain effective participation, the client and the consulting team can participate without being placed in a defensive position and all parties learn together in a managed environment.

PROJECT EVALUATION & POST IMPLEMENTATION REVIEWS

ACVM apply a critical level of independence and a basis of facilitation in their consulting assignments which involve project evaluations and reviews. The involvement of those people who generally “do the work” combined with the injection of independent specialists provides a managed level of analysis and critique.

TRAINING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT MENTORING

ACVM designs, develops and delivers a wide variety of professional development and training courses. These courses include familiarisation sessions, short courses and accredited courses which can lead to the award of a Certificate from the Institute of Value Management Australia. ACVM has existing courses and units and they also design tailor made programs for specific client needs. See more.

EARLY CONTRACTOR INVOLVEMENT

Early Contractor Involvement (ECI) is transformative in client contractor relationships and enables earlier shared appreciation of learnings from past contracts to be adopted for future contracts – better defining intended outcomes and performance requirements – recognising and jointly addressing risks in a way that enables competitive tendering and value for money outcomes whilst developing a stronger collaborative culture and relationships.

ACVM has recent experience in relation to major prisons projects and for the City of Sydney’s facilities management contracts.

HEALTH & SAFETY IN DESIGN & CONSTRUCTABILITY

Health & Safety in Design (HSID) and Constructibility workshops involve a multi-disciplinary approach towards eliminating risks to constructors, operators, maintainers as well as future users of facilities – without compromising value for money in the design and procurement of the new or refurbished facilities. It has been a feature of ACVM’s services since the company’s inception.

Workshops + Productivity

The key to a successful workshop is the ability of the facilitator to keep the discussion on track, to maintain the momentum of input and creativity, and to draw relevant information from participants so the overall context, problem, objectives & opportunities become fixed in the minds of those involved.

The challenge is to keep the group focused without stifling ideas. The participants are managed in a way that optimises their ability to both understand and contribute to the solution and outcomes, leaving with an enhanced sense of ownership and commitment to the agreed purpose and objectives.

The bigger the workshop, the greater the extent of this proprietorial feeling and the stronger the commitment to the outcomes of both the study and the long-term project.

The interaction of the participants also helps to build useful networks which are valuable during the course of the project or task realisation. Collaboration and understanding are improved with a subsequent decrease in development problems as the project or task proceeds – a team with clearer direction and purpose able to proceed with confidence.

ACVM facilitators are renowned in achieving these results.

Collaborative Contract Start-up Workshop - shows the group working in small teams to construct furniture items. The built furniture was donated afterwards to a charity.
Value Opportunity & Risk

A critical focus of our work in VM (and RM) is to foster in workshops improved shared appreciation and understanding about the project or situation, eliminating misconceptions, affirming collectively the givens and challenges involved as well as of the assumptions upon which planning and decision-making is dependent.

This foundation enables richer and more effective recognition of opportunities to improve value, through the design, engineering solutions and to recognise the relevant risks and how best to manage these.

The most effective basis for project and organisational risk management is having clarity about the purpose of the project or the organisation, their respective benefits and an appreciation of the important features about the project or the organisation.

Because it is against what is being valued – i.e. purposes, intended benefits and features; that creating improvement ideas, risk thinking, analysis and treatment measures will be most pertinent and effective.

Risk management is focused as much on opportunities as it is on things that might prevent purposes, benefits and important features from being realised.

ACVM’s team has facilitated hundreds of risk identification and management sessions for clients, all with a multi-disciplinary / multi-stakeholder group of participants.

We have also provided refresher training in risk management for over 400 project and program managers for the previous NSW Department of Public Works and Services, Queensland Public Works and for Coffey Projects group in both Australia and New Zealand.

ACVM also delivers a Master Class in Value Optimisation for BHP both in Australia and its overseas operations.

Strategic Asset Planning & Management

ACVM’s team has played a key authorship and facilitation role in the establishment and implementation of asset planning policies for state governments, including NSW Government (Total Asset Management & Gateway); Queensland Government (Government Asset Management System);

Brisbane City Council (Total Asset Management System); and has directly developed and evaluated 10-year asset strategic plans for a range of agencies in NSW (including the Department of Family and Community Services – a mega agency) and also for Western Australia’s Fire and Emergency Services Department.

Training Professional Development Mentoring

ACVM’s team has, both prior to and since its inception in 1996, delivered courses in Value Management, Advanced Facilitation, Risk Management and Strategic Asset Planning.

The course in VM is one of only two that are accredited with the professional body (IVMA).

The master class in Value Optimisation, developed exclusively for BHP, has been delivered in Australia, Canada and Chile.

All of our other courses have been delivered in Australia, Singapore and New Zealand.

Dr Roy Barton leads the educational programs development and delivery, having had decades of experience as a senior lecturer at the University of Canberra.

Other directors have also, since the formation of ACVM, delivered sessional lectures in Value Management to project management, construction and design students at Sydney University, University of Technology Sydney and the University of NSW.