University of Waikato Tauranga Campus

Once a gravel carpark, the vision for this project was to create a new campus for the University of Waikato in the heart of Tauranga’s CBD. The new campus was to deliver a modern tertiary education building. With flexible, innovative space for teaching and learning, and collaborations with industry, business and the Bay of Plenty community. We came on board in August 2015 as the project managers, “Greenstone Group was chosen from a range of very highly qualified project management companies. Among the many tertiary projects, they’ve worked on is the current campus development with the Bay of Plenty Polytechnic and we are looking forward to working with them on this city development.” – The University’s Senior Deputy Vice Chancellor, Professor Alister Jones

Stakeholder management was a key challenge for this project initially. Getting all parties to understand what was required for a successful project was key. Our focus for all of our projects is to form a close working relationship with the client team and this is what we did for the University of Waikato. Strategically, we mapped out stakeholder requirements through a stakeholder management matrix to better understand the complexities and requirements for our external and internal stakeholders. This provided a strong brief for the Architects, Jasmax and a baseline for decisions moving forward.

Early on in the consultation process, it was clear that the briefing for the physical requirements for the campus were not in line with the budgetary parameters and there was little point in moving forward until there was alignment with brief and budget. This was resolved quickly by taking the University on a tour of buildings which met either their briefing requirements or budgetary requirements and then reaching a decision as to where the University wished to adjust the parameters.

We pro-actively challenged decisions, ensuring the client understood how the building would work in terms of functionality, and provided support to both the contractor and consultants.

This resulted in the campus delivered within Budget and 1 year earlier than the Development Contract programme requirement. The new campus is a modern tertiary education building. With flexible, innovative space for teaching and learning, and collaborations with industry, business and the Bay of Plenty community. Deputy Mayor Kelvin Clout was excited to see the “dream of a university campus here in Tauranga become a reality.”– SOURCE: Bay of Plenty Times, Zoe Hunter

AWARDS

• Best in Category for Education Property Award at the Property Council New Zealand Awards 2020
• Excellence in Educational Facilities in the New Construction / Entire New Educational Facility Category at the Learning Environments Australasia's 12th Annual Awards 2020
• Triple winner in the 2019 Bay of Plenty Property Council Awards - Supreme Excellence, Urban Design and Best Team Awards
• 2020 New Zealand Architecture Awards - Education Category Winner