In March 2008, the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) set in motion a far-reaching agenda designed to promote a seamless national digital economy. The National Electronic Conveyancing System (NECS) program was one of the key initiatives – the development of a ground-breaking electronic conveyancing system, central to creating an integrated electronic property market across Australia.
With the successful completion and system launch of NECS in 2015, it brought e-conveyancing to Australia for the first time – a crucial early step in the creation of Australia’s new online property exchange, Property Exchange Australia (PEXA). Moreover, this breakthrough digital platform established new standards and created the impetus for broader disruptive innovation in the land registry industry, where manual paper-based deal reconciliations and processes were still the norm.
While most jurisdictions in Australia were planning to replace their ageing land registry systems over the next 10 years, there were no off-the-shelf solutions suitable for creating an Australia-wide system and interface for the industry. It was against this backdrop that our client – a state land title registry – took the strategic decision to engage Modis once again in the greenfield development of a scalable, cloud-based, multi-tenanted land registry platform.
And so the Registrations Reform Dealings (RRD) Project was launched.
Our 45-strong project team embarked on the project using a waterfall methodology, allowing strategic decisions around policy, operating models and future-state business processes to be agreed with our client’s executive team.
With the strategic plan in place, we turned to Agile delivery practices for the technical delivery phases. We adopted Lean delivery methodologies to create a minimum viable product, using continuous delivery models to progressively optimise functionality and a ‘right shore’ approach, with work undertaken both onshore and offshore, based on risk and value assessments.
The scale and diversity of the project – from strategy through to delivery – called for an array of expertise, so our team drew on a wealth of internal capabilities, including:
Our client is now one of the first land registries to achieve a fully electronic examinations environment, with a platform that is set to disrupt both national and international land registry markets.
Title registrations now take seconds, rather than days, with average processing times continuing to fall as the system rolls out, delivering productivity improvements throughout the land registry process.
In addition to a 40% reduction in requisitions (i.e. errors in dealings), which has helped create a vastly improved end-user experience, around 70% of transactions are now processed using electronic examinations, largely automating registrations and moving to an ‘examination by exception model’.
These efficiencies have resulted in the lowest ‘Active Documents’ (i.e. outstanding cases for property dealings or the backlog of work) and quickest ‘Turn Around Times’ (TAT) that our client has ever seen – metrics that will continue to improve as more automation capabilities come online.
What’s more, purely in terms of project performance, we have exceeded expectations – the project continues to deliver quality outcomes, all within our agreed timelines and budget. At the same time, we have also reduced our client’s legacy systems complexity and improved architecture flexibility.