Readiness Assessments

Overview

Before committing to universal water metering, councils need to understand whether their policies, systems, and people are ready to deliver it. Readiness isn’t just about installing the right hardware — it’s about ensuring every part of the organisation, from bylaws to billing, can support a fair, efficient, and customer-focused transition.

A structured readiness assessment helps councils to:

• • Understand current capability and identify gaps early — before they become project risks

  • Sequence investment sensibly across systems, people, and infrastructure

  • Build internal confidence and external credibility when engaging with the community

An initial high-level readiness assessment should be conducted across four key areas:

• • Policy and legal framework

  • Customers and Community

  • Systems and processes

  • Resourcing and capability

It needs to examine the existing situation and identify the areas needing development to ensure the organisation can accommodate/make the necessary changes without significant disruption to its services whilst also meeting the intended benefits for both council and community.

Policy and Legal Frameworks Review

To ensure your bylaws, basis for billing and charging, development manuals, and supporting policies allow for universal metering and volumetric charging:

• • Review your current water supply bylaw, billing and charging mechanisms, developer standards and manuals and administrative manuals to confirm whether and how domestic (ordinary) and non-domestic supplies are covered.

  • Identify any missing provisions, such as:

    • • Sub-metering or shared connection arrangements (cross-leases, unit titles).

      • Rights of access for meter installation and maintenance on private property.

      • Details of new installation specifications, standards and requirements

      • Processes for leak credits, dispute resolution, and meter testing.

From this gap assessment, you may need to develop or update supporting policies for:

• • Meter asset management (standards, testing, renewals).

  • Customer service (billing accuracy, hardship support, leak notifications).

  • Backflow prevention

  • Smart-meter data privacy, security, and intellectual-property rights.[GU1] 

  • Customer contact data collection

  • Compliance and enforcement protocols.

Gauging Community Sentiment

To understand community awareness, attitudes, and potential support or resistance to universal metering:

• Review existing communications, AMP statements, and council positions on metering.

• Draw on existing community insights and supplement with dedicated engagement (surveys, focus groups, social media etc.) to gauge understanding and perceptions of metering and associated issues of fairness, cost, privacy and so on.

• Capture lessons from other councils that have successfully introduced metering and the Infrastructure Commission's lessons and perspectives insights report.

• Educate customers and community on the benefits metering will deliver.

Understanding where the community sits,[GU2]  what they know, what they value, and what concerns them gives a reality check before moving into consultation or rollout planning. These insights become the backbone of the communication plan, shaping clear, trusted messages about the various benefits and the true costs of metering Evaluate Systems and Processes

To check that digital systems and internal processes can support water metering, including meter reading, data handling and storage, billing, and customer interactions:

• • Assess the maturity of any existing communications networks (e.g., LoRaWAN, NB-IoT) and data management platforms/services that may be used to support metering.

  • Confirm that your customer relationship management (CRM) system can accommodate interactions based on metering and volumetric charging

  • Confirm your billing platform (ERP) supports using meter reads for volumetric billing, flexible tariffs, and multiple meters per property.

  • Identify reporting needs for water balance, water use, zone metering, and leakage analysis.

  • Review and scope integration between different systems including SCADA, meter reading databases, and billing systems.

Together, these findings provide a clear baseline of digital readiness and highlight the system upgrades and integrations that must be in place before metering can succeed.

Resourcing and Capability Review

To identify current and future staffing capacity, skills, and capability across the organisation, and highlight any gaps that may impact operations:

• Map existing capacity and competencies across:

  • • Customer experience and contact centre services

    • Billing and finance

    • Water Supply Operations

    • Water Conservation and Demand Management

    • Planning

    • Communication and stakeholder

• Robust change management needs to be undertaken to get all functions involved

• Forecast workload spikes during rollout and the early billing cycles.

• Plan training for staff to cover capability gaps such as on volumetric billing, smart meter troubleshooting, and customer communications.

• Consider short-term resourcing boosts or shared-service arrangements.

Together, this reveals whether the organisation has the people, skills, and capacity to run a metering rollout and ongoing operations smoothly and where targeted capability building will be needed to stay ahead of the workload.

Readiness summary

Pulling these pieces together gives a clear, organisation-wide picture of true readiness:

• • where current capability gaps sit,

  • which upgrades or policy changes matter most,

  • the likely costs and sequencing required,

  • the risk profile that needs active management and

  • informs the consideration of the viability of various inhouse or external service delivery arrangements.

It creates a shared understanding across teams of what must happen next and the order in which to tackle it, setting the programme up for a smoother, lower-risk rollout.