Russell Simpson

• Provided strong leadership to a dynamic team to enhance abilities for analysing and justifying infrastructure projects business cases.
• Established strong relationships across both the Department and NSW Sector, ensuring lasting partnerships with key stakeholders.
• Collaborated closely with subject matter experts from other government delivery agency and councils to build a cohesive program of over 4,000 infrastructure projects across Metro Sydney.
• Introduced new systems, tools, and processes to achieve success in complex and rapidly changing environment with ease.

Key Achievements:

• I have been integral to the development of practices for how to best coordinate housing and infrastructure needs analysis for the Western Parklands City to set a standard for the way DPHI roles out its new Urban Development Programs across Metro Sydney and Regional NSW.
• This has involved adopting innovative engagement techniques to coordinate with whole-of-government to capture critical insights about the nexus between future housing supply and infrastructure delivery.
• I have been instrumental in creating new analytical tools and products, such the dwelling capacity methodology, to ensure the UDP Team can process and display insights to a ‘best-in-class’ standard and build trust and confidence in our program of infrastructure project delivery for central government to responds well to the emerging housing supply crisis.

• Led a multi-disciplinary team of engineers, property, transaction and financial advisors to develop a market campaign, assess bids and negotiate with the preferred applicants to achieve the best sales outcome for two development sites in a challenging urban renewal setting in the Greater Newcastle area.
• The sites sold for above market value to local business who have a unique offer of being the first environmentally sustainable product of its kind to be made available in regional areas in the eastern seaboard of Australia.
• This presented a strong joint promotional media opportunity between the successful applicants and the Minister for Planning.

• Managed a multi-disciplinery team to deliver this award winning rapid COVID-19 response pilot program. This program, with a $15 million budget to make improvements to benefit communities during COVID-19, led to 48 successful temporary projects being announced in August 2020 to improve safety and amenity with better lighting, art, furniture, greenery, additional public space and more.
• The program won the Greater Sydney Commission Planning Awards’ Chief Commissioner’s Award in October 2020. This success led to me creating the follow-up $15m Your High Street grant program, which I developed and launched in collaboration with 9 key NSW State agencies.
• The learnings from this pilot program informed the establishment of a rolling multi-fund program of public domain enhancements underpinned by a robust program logic, with target outcomes and mechanisms for tracking short, medium and long term achievement of these outcomes.

• Led a multi-disciplinery team to critically evaluate over 3,000 submissions to the draft Western Sydney Aerotropolis Plan.
• This plan was central to the early realisation of NSW Government's commitment to implement the Three Cities model for the growth of Greater Sydney.
• It attracted extensive attention, requiring my team toprocess submissions with precision and at speed. We surpassed expectation by reporting findings to the Western Sydney Planning Partnership within a rapid turn around and crystalised these findings into a high quality published report which built credibility across key government and non-government stakeholders.