A room. Then delete before digital.

Stage reached: Lab complete; the rebuilt system remains in flight.

Tools without a map. Every department had the same pressures. Nobody had connected them.

The situation

City of Mitcham had reasonable digital maturity and leadership that knew AI was coming. Departments still operated alone. There was no shared language for what AI should actually change, and the default mode was caution.

What we did

A live lab across functions. Maturity mapped. Work classified: abandon, automate, augment, agentic. A ranked portfolio followed. Three pilots, then a six-week AI Pod: Flow first — cut the work — before Form, build anything. On one decision workflow we walked the steps with the people who run them, before proposing software.

What changed

Sceptics became people who could speak from their own work. The organisation had a portfolio and a way to cut work before digitising it.

The evidence and status

Fifty-one use cases from the room. The rebuilt system is still in flight.

The pattern

If you have the tools and not the map — and every department is solving the same problem alone — start with a room, not a platform.