Complex project delivery infrastructure consultancy TBH released a white paper making the case for Australia to formally establish a whole-of-defence-sector productivity agenda – one jointly owned by Defence and industry. A New Era: Building a Whole-of-Defence Sector Productivity System identifies that the most significant productivity losses in complex Defence capability programs occur at the government-industry interface, and that those losses can only be addressed through shared investment in shared systems. The agenda outlined aims to progress shared data frameworks and common performance disciplines and deliver measurable improvement in the efficiency and reliability of Australia’s Defence capability delivery system.
“The building blocks of our whitepaper are already present across the 2026 National Defence Strategy, the FY2026–27 Defence budget, and the Productivity Commission’s December 2025 final reports on national productivity priorities. However, those building blocks are operating as disconnected reform streams rather than a coherent, jointly governed system,” says Jonathan Jacobs, Managing Director of TBH. “With Defence expenditure approaching $100 billion annually by the mid-2030s and the average major project running 21 months behind schedule, formally naming and integrating these initiatives into a whole-of-sector agenda is both achievable and urgent.” Jacobs added.
The paper attributes persistent underperformance to three structural causes: inadequate performance measurement, misaligned commercial incentives, and the absence of systematic organisational learning. Its proposed framework addresses each directly through rigorous project controls, collaborative contracting, and a shared lessons learned system – and puts forward 20 priority actions for government, the Defence Delivery Agency, and industry.
“We’re proposing a sector-level data architecture that gives Australia, for the first time, a systematic view of where productivity losses are concentrated across the entire defence sector. Built on consistent earned value management, common project controls standards, and a shared lessons taxonomy, it’s what makes productivity improvement measurable, governable, and improvable over time,” said Peter La Franchi, National Defence Director, TBH. “The TBH white paper identifies the forthcoming Defence Delivery Agency as the primary organisational vehicle for embedding a whole-of-sector productivity agenda. The foundational design decisions being made right now, on information systems, governance architecture, and performance reporting, must embed shared project controls disciplines from the outset. Retrofitting them after the fact is substantially more expensive and substantially less effective.”
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