Experience really counts when it comes to stakeholder management

JLL Infrastructure Advisory are a leading provider of niche land and property approval services to the energy, transport and communications sectors. They reduce approvals risk for projects and secure the requisite land approvals when access to land is required to develop projects.

Working on behalf of a large state based energy company, JLL sought assistance from Mipela in providing a suitable land access management solution to assist with a large lineal asset project.

Whilst members of the JLL team have been exposed to Mipela’s X-Info Suite through several mutual clients over the years, this was a first project directly between JLL and Mipela. Getting the structure of the project and an agreed plan in place was a key success factor to this project being delivered on time and on budget. Having a flexible client and an agile implementation approach resulted in functionality being delivered within the solution that was well above the clients’ expectations. This, in turn, lead to an additional project phase, specifically focusing on stakeholder management, being added to the project.

JLL Infrastructure Advisory’s Head of Infrastructure, Jamahl Waddington said, “The team at Mipela made this project easy. We were able to engage with the Mipela team both in person here in Adelaide or online. I was particularly impressed by their ability and flexibility in integrating with various data sources, mitigating the need for users to have to access multiple applications to do their job.”

Projects like this often include several groups of users from other companies who are all working on the same project. By being able to easily configure X-Info Suite to ensure that Company A only gets to see what Company A requires to see in order to conduct their role in the project was critical.

“Property access and acquisition negotiations can be of a highly a sensitive nature and being able to secure certain information can be critical to the success of the project,” said Waddington. “Mipela’s obviously experienced team were also able to provide valuable insights into best practice relating to land access.”

“We look forward to using X-Info Suite on this project and hopefully others in the future.”

Stakeholder management – the answer is blowing in the wind

Vestas Australian Wind Technology – the local arm of Danish wind energy giant Vestas – recently engaged Mipela to provide a stakeholder management platform for a new wind farm project that they are developing near Walcha in NSW.  The project, known as the Winterbourne Wind Farm, has a potential capacity of 700MW which would make it the largest wind farm in Australia if it were built today.

Vestas also wanted a stakeholder management platform that could be scaled to future development projects.  Mipela implemented X-Info Suite to provide a web based solution that can manage stakeholders, property information, agreements and associated payments as well as associated communications. Users are also able to capture data in the field using the mobile data capture app, X-Info Aware.

While the conversations with landholders in the region had been underway for the past fifteen years, the engagement had been quite informal. Owner names were tracked on a simple spreadsheet and Google Earth was used for the property and asset locations. Now all information, including the historical information already captured, is available from one source in X-Info Suite and can be used for several different purposes including bulk communications, geospatially capturing data and payments.

Project Director of the Winterbourne Wind Farm, Doug Landfear said, “The team at Mipela have provided us with a best practice stakeholder management system that has the flexibility to provide us with a comprehensive solution into the future as this project matures. Their expertise and experience in delivering the solution made the process simple – we were able to start working with the software in a matter of weeks. The Mipela Solution Specialist was insanely efficient and made the project a breeze.”

One other interesting dimension is that Vestas purchased the project from Walcha Energy who is developing other renewable energy projects in the Walcha area.  Walcha Energy is also using X-Info Suite to manage its stakeholder management across these other assets.