Auckland City Council Wins Again
2010 LGMA Management Challenge New Zealand Leg
Auckland City Council wins the New Zealand heats of the LGMA Management Challenge held last March making it a two year winning streak for the council. 
The New Zealand heats were run in three regional rounds in Auckland, Wellington and Queenstown over the week 15 to 19 March. The total entry of 12 teams was a little down on numbers from most recent years, but the ante was upped in terms of the overall quality of the teams.
This year saw some significant changes to the format and content of the challenge, as a result of LGMA contracting a new provider to develop the challenge. The old scenario of teams playing the part of the management team of Tavish Council was replaced by a new one which cast teams as the staff of Local Government Leaders Pacific (a vaguely SOLGM-like industry management organization).
The number of tasks that teams had to undertake during the day was smaller than in past years, but the tasks were more complex and demanding and allowed more daylight between “getting it done” and “doing it well”.
Another big change this year was that the pre-challenge task was a more substantial one and made up a significant component of the overall scoring for the challenge. The pre-challenge task drove off the fact that it is the Year of Women in Local Government in Australia. Teams were required to do a substantive research project looking at gender equality in their own council organisations. This task produced some really outstanding work, and in some cases a product likely to be of ongoing use to their councils.
Finally computers were allowed back into the challenge after several years of “paper only”. This introduced some interesting new twists to the management of time-lines and logistics.
Overall the facilitator and observers who had the task of scoring the teams’ performances were very impressed with the teams that fronted up. Second place was taken out by Dunedin City and Upper Hutt coming in third.
The Auckland City Council team will compete at the Australasian final on 1 and 2 July in Melbourne where they will meet teams from Tweed Shire Council (NSW), Scenic Rim Regional Council (Queensland), City of Charles Sturt (South Australia), Huon Valley Council (Tasmania), City of Melbourne (Victoria) and City of Subiaco (Western Australia).
Photo: The Auckland team 'Team Akarana'