Your council program sponsor in a 40,000-resident Victorian shire signs off the final milestone for a state-funded online planning portal. The contract pays out once the site goes live and training sessions are logged, regardless of how many applications actually arrive through it.
The portal replaces a paper-based intake that handled 1,200 submissions a year. Six months later, planners still route most files through email because the new system lacks direct links to the rates database and heritage overlay checks.
State reporting only tracks the number of registered users and training completions. No one measures the drop in average permit turnaround time or the share of residents who still call the front desk for the same information.
Procurement locked the vendor into a 12-month build with no variation budget for post-launch data feeds. When the integration gap surfaces, the team must either absorb the cost internally or wait for the next grant round two years away.
Residents who try the portal once and hit missing fields return to phone and counter channels. Call volumes remain flat while the finance team books the full capital cost against this year's budget as a completed project.
Next time a similar grant appears, the same sponsor will again chase the deadline that rewards deployment over usage. The cycle repeats because accountability stops at the funding acquittal date, not at sustained service improvement.
Shift the contract to release final payment only after six months of measured transaction migration and verified reduction in manual handling. Tie vendor fees to actual resident throughput instead of launch checklists.