In practice
Client engagements are described without naming the organisations involved. Discretion is part of the service — references are available on request, directly and in person.
Current engagement
Western Australian civil construction and infrastructure contractor
A capable, growing contractor delivering civil and infrastructure works across Western Australia. Revenue and headcount had scaled steadily. The systems and processes underneath had not.
Estimating sat apart from delivery. Plant and fleet utilisation lived in one place, cost in another, and site reality somewhere else again. Subcontractor engagement, compliance evidence, safety records, daily dockets, variations and progress claims each ran through their own combination of spreadsheets, shared drives, email threads and institutional memory. Nothing was broken, exactly. Everything took longer than it should, and no single view of a job existed without somebody assembling one by hand.
The instinct in that position is usually to go and buy something. That is where most of the money gets wasted.
Lead the transformation as a business change with a technology component — not a software project with a change slide at the end. The mandate was independent: no product to sell, no implementation revenue to protect, and no stake in which platform ultimately won.
Structured engagement with the owner, executive and the people doing the work — estimators, project managers, supervisors, plant, safety, commercial and finance. Not a survey. Conversations, on site, about what actually happens when a job is won, mobilised, delivered, varied and claimed.
Mapping the full operating chain — tender and estimating through mobilisation, site delivery, plant and labour allocation, subcontractor and supplier management, compliance and safety evidence, variations, progress claims and cost-to-complete. Every hand-off, duplicate entry, manual reconciliation and control gap made visible and quantified in effort and risk.
Designing the future state and collapsing fragmented workflows into one coherent platform — with the target operating model, data model, integration boundaries and reporting designed alongside it rather than discovered afterwards. Requirements are grounded in mapped process, so platform selection is evidence-led rather than demonstration-led, and adoption is planned as part of the build.
A decision log the owner can revisit, clear decision rights, and a reporting rhythm that surfaces problems while they are still cheap to solve. The measure of success is not that the platform goes live — it is that the business runs differently once it does.
Mid-sized businesses rarely fail at transformation because they picked the wrong software. They fail because nobody mapped how the business actually works before somebody sold them a system that assumed something else. Process first, platform second, and an independent voice in the room for both.
Track record
Prior to founding InArena Advisory, Mark Parker held executive leadership roles through to Group Executive and CIO level at a national Australian technology services firm of approximately 1,500 people, across government, defence, critical infrastructure and commercial sectors.
Accountable for enterprise technology, digital platforms, automation strategy and cyber governance. Defined organisation-wide technology direction and a multi-year investment roadmap, and led negotiations on a strategic systems replacement program spanning ERP, HRIS, CRM, PSA and CPQ.
Executive leadership of a $30M per annum state-government transformation program, and of customer transformation programs integrating people, process, technology and commercial change. Established a Scaled Agile operating model that improved cross-functional flow and delivery velocity.
Won and established a $100M+ multi-year federal ICT service contract in a region with no existing presence — end-to-end build of leadership, quality and safety systems, commercials, facilities, delivery and 200+ cleared personnel.
Strengthened enterprise risk maturity aligned to ISO 27001, the SOCI Act and Essential Eight; uplifted monitoring, assurance and governance frameworks in regulated and critical-infrastructure environments.
Next step
A first conversation is confidential, obligation-free and usually takes half an hour. You will leave it with a clearer view of the decision — whether or not we work together. If InArena isn't the right fit, we'll tell you who is.