rotorua maori land court and district / high court upgrade

Following the successful completion of the Dunedin Law Courts Project for the Ministry of Justice, Kevin was asked to lead the redevelopment of the Rotorua Māori Land Court and District / High court redevelopment. Expecting to have a budget of around $25mil we went out to tender knowing we needed a design team capable of handling a bigger project with many stakeholders. We undertook a two-stage procurement process narrowing down the respondents from the initial applicants. We were looking initially for the ability to undertake larger complicated designs and the additional resources to put onto the project should they be needed.

The initial step for the project team was to undertake a series of workshops to ascertain the end user requirements. However, during these workshops, it became abundantly clear that the buildings required a great deal much than just refurbishment. The compromises being made by the staff, due to lack of facilities, was at best counterproductive and worst dangerous to themselves and members of the public. During this stage it was important that we teased out the exact ‘needs’ and got rid of the wants, such as a roof top café. The designers produced a return brief from the information gleaned.

Reporting the findings back to the Ministry Kevin was given the go ahead to proceed with the investigation / design to find a solution that would provide the desperately needed facilities for the Court operations.

Having more than 15 separate departments working in the building and nearly 20 outside stakeholders we had to coordinate the design with the stakeholders through a series of meetings. Record keeping was particularly important as the turnover of stakeholder members was quite frequent and new members would come in with new needs and wants. A line had to be drawn to ensure we didn’t stay in the design stage forever.

Progressing through to the end of developed design the Ministry of Justice reprioritised the projects in their portfolio and the Courts was moved way down the list and put on hold.