About the project

Living Water’s mandate is to try new ways of doing things. Not only does this apply to on-the-ground land and water management solutions, but also to how we approach our work. When deciding how to undertake the development of FY18-23 strategic plans for our five catchments, we wanted a new approach that differentiated us from standard DOC and Fonterra planning processes, and chose the Google SPRINT process. 

SPRINT was developed by Google Ventures as a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. It is a ‘greatest hits’ of business strategy, innovation, behaviour science, and design thinking packaged into a tested process. Teams working together in a SPRINT can shortcut the endless debate cycle and compress months of planning time into a single week. SPRINT was tested by Google over 100 times in order to perfect the process, and is typically used for product development, strategy development, business investment decisions and customer-focused improvement initiatives.

Benefits

• Focused, fast and efficient
• Move people out of a ‘business as usual’ mindset

Progress

• SPRINT planning has been completed for the Wairua, Pukorokoro-Miranda, Ararira-LII, and Waituna catchments
• SPRINT planning is underway for the Waikato Peat Lakes and will be completed by March 2018