When Troy Jones, a Head of Apprenticeships + Traineeship (GTO) and Registered Training (RTO) Division based in NSW, recommended Urban Quest to Connie Scardamaglia, a passionate people leader who is a General Manager of Apprenticeships & Traineeship at Programmed, he wasn’t recommending an activity he’d personally played.
He’d organised an earlier Docklands event for a different Programmed team — one that didn’t know each other well enough to need a Team Activator warm-up before the challenge even started — and the feedback that came back was strong enough that Connie booked a second event, a few months later, for a very different problem: three business units, four states, and enough existing friction that “team building” wasn’t really the point. Rebuilding trust was.
Programmed is a major Australian staffing, facility management and maintenance services provider, fully owned by Tokyo-based HR conglomerate PERSOL Holdings, with over 30,000 employees across mining, healthcare and education. Connie’s group — 13 people from Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Adelaide, spanning the apprenticeship and traineeship divisions — had never worked as one unit. They’d worked around each other, with the kind of low-grade inter-team friction that org charts don’t fix.
Why Programmed Brought a Second Team to Urban Quest
Connie’s decision started with someone else’s experience, not her own:
“So I wanted to look at doing a team building exercise, and actually came through the recommendation of TJ. He had previously used Urban Quest for this activity, and there was quite a lot of positive feedback. So I was looking at something that was a bit fun, challenging.”
TJ’s account of that earlier event — the one that convinced him it was worth recommending — was specific about what made it work:
“The past event, the feedback was that it was really challenging. Local knowledge was certainly an advantage in that, but the team benefited from building a great team bond and relationship throughout the day and the challenge.”
That earlier Docklands booking had included a Team Activator session, because the team involved genuinely hadn’t met before. This second event had a different starting problem — not unfamiliarity, but friction between units that already knew each other too well.
Bridging Three Business Units Across Four States
Connie was direct about what she needed the day to solve:
“Talking about the team bond and the challenge, it was certainly why we chose it specifically — to build better team relationships. So breaking up different business units and having them complete a challenge together certainly builds those bonds a little bit stronger.”
With people flying in from three other states for the day, the Questbusters Docklands format did the one thing a seating chart or an icebreaker exercise can’t: it put people from different business units into small teams where nobody could opt out. Thirteen people, deliberately mixed, racing against the clock through the Docklands precinct — there’s no room for a business unit to quietly stick together and avoid the others.
This is the business outcome Urban Quest is built to produce for organisations managing exactly this kind of structural distance. When the goal is genuine cross-unit trust rather than a pleasant afternoon, the format has to force interdependence — not suggest it.
What the Day Revealed
Asked what he noticed about his own team’s dynamic, TJ described something that plays out in almost every Urban Quest event but rarely gets named this clearly:
“It was quite interesting, people taking on different roles throughout the day. Someone was the typer, someone was the thinker, someone was the trivia challenge nerd. So certainly determined who was great at what role very early on in the day.”
That kind of fast, informal role-sorting is exactly what a group of people who don’t normally work together needs — a low-stakes way to learn who’s good at what, without a performance review in sight. Connie summed up the physical side of it too:
“It was probably a little bit more challenging than what I expected. It was a lot more physical, a lot more active and challenging, but I think it was great. It really made us all come together as a team and work together as a team.”
From the Event Floor Back to the Office
The clearest evidence that the day worked came in the comparison to the earlier event — the one with the unfamiliar team:
Troy: “Certainly from the previous event, the vibe is much different. There’s much more collaboration, probably much more trust amongst the teams. A lot of those guys had not met each other before taking on a challenge together, and since the day, certainly working much more collaboratively and openly.”
Connie’s response confirmed it without needing to add much:
“I agree. I don’t think I’ve got much more to add to that. It’s a fairly new team — we’ve got quite a few new members in the team. So bringing them all together, working together — I just agree to what TJ has just said there.”
That kind of plain agreement, rather than a polished separate answer, is often the most reliable signal in a case study interview. When two people who ran different questions land in the same place without coordinating, it’s not a scripted takeaway — it’s what actually happened.
Why TJ Brought Them Back
The clearest articulation of why Programmed chose Urban Quest a second time — for a completely different problem — came from TJ, comparing the two teams directly:
“We came back purely from the collaboration aspect. The other team was different business units that had been in the business for quite a while. And this team are all new to each other — quite a few new people in Connie’s team, some of them meeting for the first time today. So it was great to kick off collaboration from the get-go.”
Two different teams, two different starting problems — unfamiliarity in one case, entrenched friction in the other — and the same format addressed both. That’s the strongest kind of returning-customer proof: not “we had fun so we came back,” but “we had a different problem the second time, and it still worked.”
For other Programmed teams in Connie and TJ’s position — bringing together colleagues who’ve never met, or colleagues who have history that needs resetting — the outdoor Docklands format scales to distributed, interstate groups without losing the small-team stakes that make it work.
For a similar story of a corporate client choosing between CBD and Docklands formats across repeat bookings, read AvePoint’s Stephanie Webb on coming back for more, or Solar Battery Group’s director on why they returned to Docklands for a second event.
Explore Urban Quest’s corporate team building formats →
Read about Questbusters in Docklands →
Contact Urban Quest for a corporate proposal →
Troy (TJ) Jones is Head of Programs, Apprenticeships, Traineeships and RTO Business at Programmed. Connie Scardamaglia is General Manager, Apprenticeships & Traineeships (East Coast) at Programmed. Urban Quest has delivered two Docklands team building events for Programmed teams within a few months of each other.
