In conversation with
Mick O’Bradaigh
Mick O’Bradaigh is a highly experienced Project Director and has worked across a range of industries in his career including telecommunications, transport and electricity.
He currently leads Ventia’s Western Power contract where we provide maintenance services across Western Power’s distribution network.
Prior to this he led the VentureSmart team, a joint venture undertaking planned and reactive maintenance for all Main Roads WA’s electrical assets across WA including Smart Freeways and other assets.
Ventia commenced working across the Western Power electricity network in 2024.
From early mobilisation, to building a growing team of more than 50 people, our crews are now proudly servicing the network across metropolitan Perth and regional Western Australia.
For Project Director Mick O’Bradaigh, planning has been key, it’s a philosophy learned over many years and one that will continue as the team continues to scale up to deliver service excellence.
What have been some of the highlights across the first few months of the contract?
“Moving into our state-of-the-art depot in Forrestdale and welcoming our new fleet of trucks, EWP’s (elevated work platforms) and crane borers as well as welcoming the 50 plus strong team to the growing Ventia energy networks team in WA.
“Operationally our first pole swap and transformer upgrade, working in environmentally sensitive areas and ensuring that endangered species plants were well protected."
Safely delivering 11 pole replacements in one day has been another highlight, prioritisation of the works and considered planning which reduced the impact on the local primary school and residents, a lot of credit goes to our planning and switching teams for this.
How have you gone about bringing a team together to hit the ground running?
“We placed an emphasis on team building and building a culture and capability to create teams that work well together. With new field staff joining, some of whom were working on Western Power’s network for the first time, or others returning after working away on other networks, careful consideration was made in ensuring employees were supported and buddied up with our experienced team members. We also spent a lot of time getting to know the customer and subcontractors.“
This approach provided the right combination to ensure employees understood how we approach and manage safety and ensuring we are delivering work for the customer to the highest possible standards.
“This was evident when we safety completed our first remote swing in mid-January this year (four hours north of Perth) managing though extreme heat conditions to successfully complete the package of upgrader works"
Ventia has a large and diverse business, how has that assisted with the mobilisation for this contract?
“We have been able to bring a number of people into the project from across the Ventia business, from the Telecommunications, Defence and Transport sectors including some of the best people from around Australia and New Zealand."
“So, we had from the start people who understand the business and how to get things done, they already know how the finance, commercial and IT systems work and all those other tasks so that was an advantage."
“We’ve also been able to bring in some great external people, including those who have worked with Ventia in the past and who were eager to rejoin the team, allowing us to build out our team to complement those people we brought in from other parts of Ventia.”
Reliability and efficiency are obviously a key part of delivering service excellence across energy network customers. How do we ensure we’re providing the best possible service to our customers?
“More than 80% of the job that we’re doing in this environment is around pre-planning.
“You’ve got to have a strong back-office team and systems.
“If you’ve got a good scoping process, a good planning process, and a focus on scheduling, logistics, materials, it all has to come together along with the subcontractor base to provide that additional support for critical activities like traffic management.
“There is a huge amount that goes into getting prepared and then the crews delivering on site is the last piece of the puzzle.”
How is the new depot helping you to integrate the team into the local community?
As a business we’re very community minded, we live in the residential suburbs, that's also where we work. We're interacting with members of the public every day, we’re highly visible so when we're turning off your power, we've got to explain to you why we're doing that and ensure people understand it’s for the greater good.
“We’re very involved in the local indigenous community, it was important to have that link from the start and now we’re developing other programs to bring in apprentices and other jobs and that creates that next level of link into the community."
How are we looking to add value for our energy networks customers?
"We’re always looking at innovation, so utilising things like drone technology, data analysis and our asset management expertise. We’re offering new ways of providing data to our customers to inform them more easily, digitising processes from digital time sheets, to reports to capturing field data live. None of it is ground-breaking but it’s making the day-to-day operation run more smoothly."
"With all the different capabilities across Ventia we can also work with our customers in the future around different ways of doing maintenance or different ways of constructing, asset management and bring this expertise from our wider business."
