How Maribyrnong City Council trained 118 staff to map their own processes in 13 weeks

The Challenge

Justine was brought in to deliver a handful of IT strategy projects that had funding and executive backing but hadn’t moved. One of them was process automation. Her first question stopped it in its tracks: did anyone know what the council’s processes actually were? They didn’t.

“I’m not sure how anyone would know what to automate if they don’t have their processes documented to start with.”
— Justine Resta, IT Project Manager, Maribyrnong City Council

They had a genuine gap to close. Maribyrnong was partway through adopting Microsoft 365, so Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive were still new to a lot of staff.

The council had rolled out Promapp some years before, but the maps hadn’t kept pace with the organisation. Mardi went digging and found 683 documents saved in old formats nobody could open anymore, so there wasn’t much to carry forward. They were building from a clean slate.

“People have actually left the organisation because they can’t get their head around things. They try to work their way through it, it all gets too hard, and then they leave.”
— Justine Resta, IT Project Manager, Maribyrnong City Council

Then there was the clock. Both Justine and Mardi were on contracts ending in June, and procurement ate half their time, so the project didn’t start until mid-January.

That left about four months to build something that would outlast them.

The Solution

Justine split the work in two. One stream mapped the council’s messy payroll processes, so the requirements would be ready for the HR and payroll system coming next financial year.

The other was a voluntary programme to find the people who already wanted to document their own work, and give them what they needed to do it.

They led with method, not software.

“Our initial focus wasn’t the software. It was governance, definitions, best practice, standards and templates. Software changes over time, but good practice in process thinking is transferable.”
— Mardi Hirst, Business Process Analyst, Maribyrnong City Council

Staff who had never mapped anything could use AI to get past the blank screen and generate a first draft, then correct it with what they actually knew, in plain English that held up across a workforce speaking over 80 languages.

And the rollout stayed low-friction throughout: no manager sign-off gate, staff free to publish and edit their own maps, wrapped in a bit of community rather than compliance.

Results

What surprised them was where the demand came from. Not the corporate teams you’d expect, but the frontline, the ones usually written off as the hardest to engage.

A library team asked for a process because they onboard casuals constantly and could see things being missed. The aquatic centre mapped a Code Brown, which is exactly what you think it is.

“I hadn’t thought of the libraries as early adopters. She said, look, we’ve got so many casuals, we’re doing onboarding all the time. We’d love a process so we’re all doing it the same way and ticking things off, because we can see there are gaps.”

— Mardi Hirst, Business Process Analyst, Maribyrnong City Council

The strongest proof came from emergency management. Two people, one hour of protected time each morning, slowly building a hierarchy of SOPs in Flowingly.

It’s work that runs 24 hours a day, and no on-call officer can be expected to hold everything about every fire, flood and road accident in their head.

Where the team once kept paper folders at home for after-hours callouts, the process now walks staff to a decision, monitor, prepare, activate or escalate, so routine calls get handled instead of passed up the line.

“Staff are guided step by step through what to do, so they’re not relying on memory or having to figure it out on the spot. We’re seeing fewer unnecessary calls to senior staff, and a smoother, faster transition from identifying an issue to actually doing something about it.”

— Andy Chan, Senior Community Resilience Officer, Maribyrnong City Council

Both contracts have now ended, which was always the point. Maribyrnong has champions across the organisation, a standard everyone was taught the same way, and one place where process lives.

Justine’s advice to other councils starting out: make it business-owned, not project-owned, and treat processes as living assets, not set-and-forget documents.

What started as a structured rollout turned into a groundswell, and that’s the part that makes it stick.