The development of a tool to enable crucial data about our organisation to be easily accessed, in turn reducing travel time and costs and improved community engagement, was just one of the innovations presented by the 2020 Graduate Program participants.

At Ventia, we are passionate about developing our people and providing them with opportunities to innovate, collaborate and drive value for our business and our communities.

This is reflected strongly in our Graduate Program, in particular through the Case Challenge - a six-month long innovation competition. The competition sees our graduates and early career people from across our business join forces to develop a creative solution to a current Ventia challenge.

Challenges tackled by the teams included identifying business opportunities post COVID-19, improving our business resilience and refining our sustainability credentials. These broad themes required our teams to define, reframe and apply the challenge in multiple ways.

Throughout the six months of the competition, teams attended workshops on continuous improvement, creative problem solving and apps training. This provided a solid foundation on which to build their solution and ensured that the teams' out-of-the-box ideas were feasible and well thought out.

The culmination of their efforts was on show at a 'Showcase Day', which also gave participants the opportunity to sharpen their presentation skills as they delivered their project findings to a judging panel. The panel included leaders from across our business, from different sectors and functions.

Team Quaranteam wins

Each team had a unique name, and it was the cleverly named Quaranteam who were declared the winners for our 2020 Case Challenge. Quaranteam's concept, the Ventia Workforce Map, is a centralised hub mapping our combined organisation's footprint for Australia and New Zealand. This tool allows users to filter data on the map allowing for information to be easily accessed. Quaranteam's project has had real interest from some of our senior leaders, who are looking to sponsor the continued developing of this concept.

One of our judges was particularly impressed,

'The potential of this tool is pretty exciting," Fiona McDougall General Manager Pre-Contracts says. "I am looking forward to its practical application at Ventia."

This Case Challenge gave our people the chance to explore the kind of significant organisational challenges that many companies face, encouraging them to collaborate, think creatively and utilise technology and innovation to articulate their vision for Ventia. The projects they delivered showcased what our emerging workforce can achieve with the right tools and support.