How Aurecon built an enterprise delivery platform on ClickUp without the million-dollar build

Vanessa Visman is a principal and part-owner at Aurecon, leading its Asset Management and Operations practice. Franco Pacitto and Roy Taute, both associates in Asset Performance & Assurance, plan deliverables with clients and coach operations people who have never run a project. All three came from the same firm, where they'd spent years building the tool they now needed again.

It began in 2010 as an Access database wired into Microsoft Project, with Excel bolted on. "We upgraded, and we upgraded, and we upgraded it," Vanessa said. It did the job. It was also a software product owned by a firm that sold engineering and advisory services.

One program can span 30+ client functions against capital budgets of $200 to $300 million, requiring thousands of documents and tasks to be tracked and completed. On one, an asset management team halved its plan from 80,000 hours to 40,000 and told nobody. "So did you just push your whole resourcing back?" Vanessa asked the room. "What value have you cut out?"

None of those three problems is solvable by building the tool again the same way, which is the conclusion the team carried into Aurecon. What they did own was fifteen years of turning a construction handover into a plan operations people could actually run. So they went to market instead, and configured ClickUp into ClickUp Deliver, their own branded delivery platform: ClickUp's tasks and automations underneath, Aurecon's methodology on top. Deliverables load in bulk into a deep hierarchy, weighted by effort, with Schedule Performance Index and earned value tracked live and an approval on every scope change.

Mining and energy clients expect that level of schedule control as a minimum, and most tools couldn't deliver it. "Monday, Asana, they weren't able to configure what we wanted," Roy said. Vanessa was the room's biggest skeptic; a 2021 review at their old firm had turned up nothing. What changed her mind was seeing that ClickUp already offered features they'd planned to add to their own tool years down the line.

At their old firm, the team pitched clients with the tool they'd built. Now they compete against it. Up against it head-to-head at a major mining company, Franco's assessment was: "We smashed it." The client then handed over its full list of PMO principles, and ClickUp Deliver met every one.

Clients also keep pulling more of their own work in. On a major greenfield copper project in South America, involving a new mine and concentrator, the rollout started narrow: Aurecon reported only its own scope through ClickUp Deliver, and the client ran everything else its own way. Then the General Manager saw the dashboards and asked to move his whole team in. "They transitioned away from what they were doing to having all their data in ClickUp, everyone using it, internal and external, with access to the same data set. We were all working collaboratively", notes Vanessa.

Every client since has asked for their own version, with admin rights to build their own dashboard cards. The workload view, the feature that first sold Franco and Vanessa, shows individual capacity across a whole program.

Cost Performance Index tracking is next, extending governance from schedule into budget. More agents are coming, and more mining and energy clients. A flagship engagement is road-testing it against the sector's most demanding project people. Working with the ClickUp team, Vanessa said, felt "like a genuine partnership rather than a service provider relationship," and unlike last time, the people building the tool understood project management.

The arithmetic has held up. Their old firm spent millions building its tool and still pays to keep it alive. Aurecon pays a license fee, brings the methodology, and lets someone else carry the upgrades, the security work, and the roadmap that used to be an internal funding fight.

What the decision bought is already showing up in the work they win. With no proprietary platform to fund, patch, and defend, and no maintenance bill running into the millions, the team now goes head-to-head with seven years of custom build in front of the country's biggest miners and wins.