Here’s a question that most roading coordination teams already know the answer to, even if they haven’t put a number on it: how much of the week goes on admin that a system should be handling?
Not the complex, judgement-heavy work. Reviewing a traffic management plan for a high-risk site, coordinating overlapping works on a busy corridor, talking through conditions with a contractor who’s new to the process. That’s the work a coordination team is genuinely good at, and it’s the reason most people got into the role.
The other stuff is the problem. Chasing incomplete applications. Manually calculating fees.
Following up on start-work notifications that never arrived. Compiling weekly reports from data that lives in three different places. The work that fills the gaps between the interesting bits.
It’s a pattern that shows up in corridor access teams of all sizes, across councils and transport agencies alike. The teams doing the most important coordination work are often the ones most buried in admin. And the frustrating part is that most of that admin is entirely avoidable.
If you work in a corridor access team, your week probably looks something like this.
Applications come in missing key information. Maybe the TMP doesn’t cover a detour route, or the applicant hasn’t specified the road level correctly. So someone on your team picks up the phone or fires off an email, waits for a response, follows up again three days later, and eventually gets what they need. Multiply that across dozens of applications a week and you’ve got a significant chunk of someone’s time gone on what is essentially data entry quality control.
Then there’s fee calculation. Most authorities have fee schedules that factor in the type of work, the road classification, the duration, the length of any excavation, and whether specific conditions apply. Working through that manually for each permit is slow and error-prone. Get it wrong and you’re either undercharging (which nobody notices until audit time) or creating billing disputes with contractors who feel they’ve been overcharged.
Notifications are another time sink. Under the National Code of Practice, contractors need to notify the authority when they start work and when they complete it. When those notifications don’t come through, someone on your team has to chase them. And if the notifications are late, there are often penalty fees that need to be applied, which means more manual processing.
Finally, reporting. Whether it’s processing time metrics for management, workload summaries for resource planning, or closure reports for the public, the data usually needs to be pulled together from multiple sources. That’s more time spent on spreadsheets when your team could be out doing site audits or working through coordination issues.
The real cost of manual processes isn’t just the time they consume directly. It’s the downstream problems they create.
When start-work notifications are late or missing, your team can’t schedule audits properly. You end up doing reactive audits based on complaints rather than proactive ones based on actual work schedules. That’s a fundamentally different approach to compliance, and it means problems get found later rather than earlier.
When fee calculations are done manually, inconsistencies creep in. Different staff members might interpret the same fee schedule slightly differently. Over time that creates fairness issues between contractors, and it makes your fee revenue harder to predict and reconcile.
When conflict detection depends on someone remembering to check, conflicts get missed. Two sets of works end up on the same corridor at the same time, traffic management plans clash, and the public sees what looks like poor planning. In high-volume environments where dozens of projects run simultaneously across a network, the cost of missed coordination is measured in crew downtime and repeated disruption to communities. Manual coordination simply doesn’t scale.
Each of these problems is small on its own. But they compound. And they tend to compound fastest when your team is busiest, which is exactly when you can least afford them.
This isn’t a case for automation as some kind of silver bullet. But there are specific areas where the right system genuinely changes the day-to-day experience for a coordination team.
Digital submission with built-in validation means incomplete applications don’t land on someone’s desk in the first place. If the applicant hasn’t provided the required information, the system tells them before they submit. That alone eliminates a huge amount of back-and-forth.
Configurable fee rules that calculate charges automatically based on work type, road level, excavation length, and duration remove the manual step entirely. The fee schedule is set up once, and every permit gets the correct charge applied consistently. When fee schedules change, you update the rules in one place rather than retraining every staff member on the new rates.
Automated notifications and penalties mean the system tracks whether contractors have submitted their start-work and completion notices. If they haven’t, the relevant fees or penalties get applied without someone on your team having to remember to check. That’s not just a time saving. It’s a fairness issue. When penalties are applied consistently, contractors take the notification requirements more seriously.
Conflict detection before submission is where the planning map becomes genuinely powerful. When an applicant can see existing and upcoming works on the same corridor before they even submit, many conflicts resolve themselves. The applicant adjusts their dates, or the authority flags the clash early enough to coordinate. Either way, the problem gets solved before anyone’s on site.
Dashboards and scheduled reports that pull from live data mean your team stops spending Friday afternoons compiling numbers from spreadsheets. Processing time reports, workload distribution, open permits by status, fee revenue tracking. Set it up once, schedule it, and it runs itself. Export when you need to dig deeper.
To be clear about what this isn’t: this isn’t an argument for reducing team sizes. If anything, most corridor access teams are already stretched thin. The point is that when you take away the repetitive admin, the same team can do more of the work that actually requires human judgement and expertise.
That means more time for proactive coordination instead of reactive firefighting. More time for site audits and compliance checks that catch problems early. More time building relationships with contractors so that issues get resolved through a conversation rather than through escalation. More time analysing patterns in the data to improve how the network is managed overall.
The work that matters most is the work that’s hardest to automate: reviewing complex TMPs, negotiating timing with multiple parties on a busy corridor, making a call on whether a particular set of conditions is appropriate for a high-risk site. Free your team up to spend their time on that, and the whole operation runs better.
If your coordination team got back even 30% of the hours they currently spend on manual admin, what would they do with it?
That’s not a rhetorical question. It’s worth sitting down with your team and actually asking. The answers will tell you a lot about where the bottlenecks are and what your people would prioritise if they had the bandwidth.
Most corridor access teams come back with the same themes: more time on site, better relationships with contractors, earlier identification of problems, and less stress around reporting deadlines. None of those require new people. They require existing people to spend their time differently.
The tools to make that shift are available now. myWorksites handles fee calculation, notification tracking, conflict detection, and reporting out of the box. It’s not a generic workflow tool adapted for roading. It’s built specifically for this job, designed around how road authorities and contractors actually work.
If you’re curious about what that looks like in practice, have a look at how authorities like Auckland Transport, Christchurch City Council and Timaru District Council are already using the platform. If your team is still spending their week chasing paperwork, there’s a conversation worth having.