Sustainable water infrastructure is not just a technical challenge, it is an organizational one. Avenew helped VEI and PDAM Tirta Moedal Semarang build the project management foundation that investment programs of this importance require: clearer governance, more structured practices, and a team that understands how to plan, execute, and monitor projects with consistency.
Where Development Finance Meets Operational Reality
Access to safe drinking water is one of the most foundational development commitments of our time. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals place clean water and sanitation at the center of the global development agenda, and in 2015 the Dutch government made a formal commitment to contribute to that goal, pledging to help provide safe drinking water to 30 million people as part of its WASH (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) strategy running through 2030.
WaterWorX is the program through which all ten Dutch water companies have chosen to honor that commitment together. Structured as a Water Operator Partnership program, WaterWorX connects Dutch water utilities with their counterparts in developing countries through long-term, not-for-profit partnerships focused on knowledge transfer, institutional strengthening, and the sustained improvement of water and sanitation services. The partnerships are designed to be peer-to-peer in spirit, one utility helping another navigate the operational, governance, and technical challenges of building a more reliable water system, rather than top-down donor relationships.
VEI, the Dutch water operator leading the Semarang partnership, has been working with PDAM Tirta Moedal Kota Semarang since 2019. PDAM Tirta Moedal is one of Indonesia's older public water utilities, with roots going back to 1911 and a current service base of over 181,000 customers representing roughly 60 percent of Semarang's population of 1.66 million. The utility manages a substantial annual investment program, with a planned investment budget of IDR 130 billion per year, drawing on PDAM's own capital alongside external sources including government capital participation and central government support, directed at infrastructure expansion, service improvement, and the water system upgrades needed to serve a growing urban population.
With Phase II of the WaterWorX-PDAM partnership running from 2022 to 2026, VEI identified a specific and pressing need: strengthening PDAM's internal project management capability to ensure that its investment program could be executed with the discipline, consistency, and visibility that the scale of its annual project portfolio required. For this, VEI engaged Avenew Indonesia as a specialist project management consultant.
The Capability Gap Behind the Investment Program
Public utilities managing large annual investment programs face a characteristic organizational challenge. The technical and financial dimensions of water infrastructure investment, the engineering design, the procurement of materials and contractors, the regulatory approvals, the financing arrangements, tend to receive institutional attention and resource allocation. The project management infrastructure needed to plan, govern, coordinate, and monitor that investment reliably tends to receive less.
The consequence, for organizations at an earlier stage of project management maturity, is a familiar pattern: projects that begin with good intentions and adequate budgets become difficult to track, roles and responsibilities blur across departments as execution progresses, coordination between project teams and senior leadership becomes fragmented, and the organization loses the visibility it needs to make timely, informed decisions about its own investment program. Annual investment targets that looked achievable in the business plan become harder to meet in practice, not because resources are absent, but because the management discipline to deploy them effectively is not yet fully developed.
For PDAM Tirta Moedal, whose business plan projected IDR 130 billion in annual infrastructure investment across multiple concurrent projects involving diverse partners, financiers, and contractors, this gap between investment ambition and execution capability was the central challenge that the WaterWorX engagement was designed to address. VEI brought Avenew in precisely to close it.
Avenew's Approach: Building Capability From the Inside Out
Avenew's engagement covered a structured sequence of activities conducted in Semarang over the period from May to June 2024, combining diagnostic assessment with practical capability development and the co-creation of project management tools and guidelines that PDAM's own team could use going forward.
Gap Analysis of Project Management Practices
Gap Analysis of Project Management Practices established the honest baseline that any meaningful capability development program requires. Avenew developed a structured discussion guide to frame interviews and working sessions with PDAM's Board of Directors and key departments, including Planning and Program Development. This discussion guide-driven assessment approach was deliberate: rather than applying a generic maturity framework mechanically, Avenew structured the diagnostic conversations to surface the specific organizational dynamics, working culture dimensions, and process gaps most relevant to PDAM's situation. The assessment covered eight areas of organizational interest, from project management practice and performance measurement to change management readiness and risk management capability, producing a grounded, contextually specific picture of where PDAM stood and what it most needed.
Collaborative Workshop Facilitation
Collaborative Workshop Facilitation was the primary vehicle through which Avenew translated diagnostic findings into organizational learning. Working directly with PDAM's teams, Avenew facilitated structured workshops designed not only to transfer project management knowledge, but to build the shared understanding and organizational commitment that genuine capability development requires. The workshops addressed the practical mechanics of project planning, execution, monitoring, and governance, illustrated through examples and exercises relevant to PDAM's actual investment project context rather than abstract methodology. Critically, the workshops were designed to create awareness of the value of improving current ways of working alongside showing how those improvements could be made, engaging both the motivation and the mechanics of change.
Development of Project Management Guidelines
Development of Project Management Guidelines produced the practical reference documentation that PDAM needed to anchor its improved practices in something durable and accessible. Working collaboratively with PDAM's teams, Avenew helped develop guidelines covering how projects are initiated, defined, executed, monitored, and evaluated within PDAM's specific organizational context, what has been called the PDAM Standard Project Approach. This was not a generic project management manual imported from elsewhere. It was a set of guidelines developed with and for PDAM, reflecting its organizational structure, its investment program characteristics, and the practical realities of how its teams work.
Portfolio and Role Clarification Structuring
Portfolio and Role Clarification Structuring addressed one of the most consequential dimensions of PDAM's project management challenge: the need for clearer distinction between investment projects and regular operational activities, and the need for clearly defined roles and responsibilities across the departments involved in project planning, monitoring, and evaluation. Avenew worked with PDAM to map and clarify these distinctions, providing the organizational logic that reduces overlap, eliminates ambiguity about accountability, and gives senior leadership a clearer picture of what is being managed as a project and what sits within normal operational activity. The TUPOKSI, the primary duties and functional assignments, of relevant roles were reviewed and updated to reflect these clarified responsibilities.
Change Management
Throughout the engagement, Avenew also worked to support VEI in the change management dimension of the partnership: helping PDAM's leadership understand the importance of organizational commitment to improved project management, and the role that top management engagement plays in enabling the kind of company-wide change that transforms how an organization actually executes its work. Capability tools and training are necessary conditions for improvement, but they are not sufficient without the institutional commitment from senior leadership to hold the organization to the new standard.
The Outcome: A Practical Foundation for Consistent Execution
The engagement delivered a set of concrete, immediately usable outputs: practical project management guidelines tailored to PDAM's context, clearer role and portfolio structures, a more shared organizational understanding of project management principles, and a set of action plans developed in collaboration with the WaterWorX team for PDAM to carry forward into the remainder of Phase II.
Beyond the documents, the more important outcome was organizational: PDAM's teams developed a clearer, more consistent shared language for talking about and managing projects. Workshops created spaces for reflection that surfaced alignment gaps and built understanding across departments. The distinction between projects and regular activities, which had contributed to role overlap and coordination difficulty, became clearer and more operationally actionable.
For VEI and the WaterWorX program, Avenew's contribution strengthened the project management dimension of the partnership at a critical moment in Phase II, giving PDAM the practical tools and guidance it needed to manage its investment program more effectively and to demonstrate the kind of execution consistency that makes the case for continued international development partnership.
Project Management as a Public Service Enabler
The WaterWorX engagement sits at an intersection that is rare in Avenew's project portfolio: the intersection of international development cooperation, public utility management, and organizational capability transformation. The work was different in character from the large infrastructure PMO deployments or the national strategic project oversight roles that define much of Avenew's consulting practice, but the fundamental principle was the same.
Sound project management capability is not a corporate luxury. For a public utility responsible for clean water access to over a million people, managing an annual investment program of IDR 130 billion across multiple projects, partners, and financing sources, the quality of the organization's project management practice has a direct bearing on the reliability of the services it delivers and the communities it serves. Improving that capability, through honest assessment, practical tool development, and collaborative learning, is a contribution with consequences that extend well beyond the organization itself.
This is Avenew at its most purposeful: bringing project management expertise to bear in service of outcomes that matter not just to the institutions we work with, but to the people those institutions are built to serve.
