Immigration Reform (the Program) is an ambitious program to transform Australia’s visa services over the next decade. MXA were engaged in a strategic advisor role to assist the Immigration Reform Program Management Office (PMO) with planning for the next phase of the Program’s delivery.

The Immigration Reform Program aims to create a visa and citizenship delivery that promotes travel, security, and Australia’s interests. The Program will simplify visa policy and streamline visa service delivery through digitisation and market partnerships. It will also strengthen intelligence and enhance technology, while equipping its workforce to deal with the continuously changing nature of today’s world.

The PMO engaged MXA to assist in facing the following challenges:

• Maintaining confidence of key stakeholders and government.
• Providing decision makers with the information they need to make good decisions.
• Holding the information it needs to provide accurate, timely advice regarding delivery of the Immigration Reform program.
• Revalidating the strategic planning to date, particularly the benefits, and develop further detail.
• Providing clear traceability from each project through to the capabilities, outcomes and benefits being delivered.

To assist the PMO with these challenges, MXA developed an understanding of the projects currently contributing to Immigration Reform’s benefits and consulted stakeholder to develop four key deliverables: Project Flipbook – a paper-based review of the in-flight and upcoming projects currently contributing to Immigration Reform and classification of projects that are core, enabling, supporting / stablising and dependent to the Program.

• Traceability Map of in-flight projects to benefits – a visual depiction of the linkage between projects, outputs and strategic benefits.
• Benefit Profiles – a review of the existing project benefits and realignment to strategic Program benefits to develop clearly defined and measurable benefits.
• Visualisations – several posters were created to facilitate understanding of the functions of the different project teams for developing the Program’s FutureBusiness Design.

This planning and work placed the PMO in a position to clearly articulate the value and purpose of each piece of work within the program, informing trade-offs by the Senior Executives as the environment changes throughout the life of the program, and provide rigour and confidence in those decisions.