/work/land-use-victoria/case study
Two government websites, one statutory deadline
The Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning needed two complex government websites merged into one, by 30 June, during the year the entire delivery model went remote overnight.
The situation
Land Use Victoria's digital presence was split across two complex sites with overlapping content, different structures, and audiences who needed authoritative answers about land, property and valuation. Consolidation was part of a major transformation programme with a fixed, immovable end-of-financial-year deadline. Then covid arrived mid-delivery and the whole operation, team, stakeholders, vendors, went remote in a week.
The decision
I was accountable for the website delivery, and I made two calls early. First, I took on the most complex content development stream myself rather than distributing it, because the gnarliest content migration decisions needed to sit with whoever owned the delivery risk. Second, when remote work hit, I re-planned around asynchronous decision-making: fewer meetings, clearer written decision points, tighter vendor coordination. Government delivery lives or dies on decision latency, and remote work punishes teams that never wrote anything down.
What shipped
land.vic.gov.au: one consolidated platform, merged from two, with the content architecture rebuilt rather than transplanted. I led the content stream, planned the launch communications, onboarded new team members mid-flight, and coordinated the external vendors through to go-live. The discovery phase was mine too: stakeholder interviews, IA and pain-point analysis, journey mapping, and the SEO and analytics requirements the delivery team built against. We didn't miss a day to the remote transition, and we didn't miss the date.
Proof
The statutory deadline. Hit it.
Complex government sites merged with a rebuilt content architecture
Lost to the shift to fully remote delivery
"He's one of those rare leaders who not only excels at strategic thinking but also brings a calm, practical lens to every challenge."
What it says about how I work
Content people who can't run projects hand their strategy to whoever can. I hold both. This project is why I sat the PMP the year before: the certification wasn't the point, the vocabulary was. When delivery pressure arrives, and it always arrives, I want to be the person the plan lives with, not the person waiting on it.