Peer Review of the Oxley Police Academy Relocation Business Case

Background

In late 2022/early 2023, NineSquared was commissioned to undertake an independent “Design and Operations” peer review of the Queensland Police Service’s Oxley Academy Relocation Business Case. This peer review was aimed at providing assurance on key aspects of the proposed business case to be presented to the Queensland Police Service (QPS) Board and the Queensland Government’s Cabinet Budget Review Committee.

Our role

Our review terms of reference asked us to look at the following four focus areas:

• Review of the social (stakeholder) impact evaluation approach adopted used to explain the possible positive and negative benefits if the relocation project is implemented.
• Review of key QPS stakeholder input into the proposed facility design and operations.
• Conduct a desktop review of other interstate and international facilities to capture best practice and assess whether it has been factored into the concept design of the facility.
• Review if operational change management impacts have been appropriately captured in the business case.

To deliver our review, we adopted a methodology that provided progressive advice to the Project Team so that several key areas for attention and improvement could be implemented during the course of our review. This collaborative approach was designed to assist the Project Team with meeting extremely tight timelines for preparing and lodging a business case report. Also, our reporting methodology used “confidence ratings” giving our level of confidence on each of our four review focus areas.

Results and relevance

Our peer review advice resulted in the following main outcomes:

• Positive assurance that the aspects of the business case we reviewed were fit-for-purpose.
• Improvement to the underlying logic and presentation of what positive benefits would potentially be gained (in terms of Queensland Police’s capability/capacity and the community) if the Oxley Academy was to be relocated to a new site.
• Provide additional examples of benchmark international projects that aligned with QPS’s objectives for relocating the Oxley Police Academy.
• Confirmation of the change management work done by QPS for the business case.

NineSquared received positive client feedback on our collaborative approach and that our advice was very beneficial to the relocation project.

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