80% productivity gain. Delivered early, under budget. The capability stayed.

The Situation

ACMA engaged ZXM to examine a stalled mission-critical business project and determine what would be required to recover it. The project had a development team in place and active business stakeholders — but delivery had stopped. Work was accumulating without progressing, and no clear path to completion had been established.

ACMA · Team Formation

What the diagnostic found

Before any intervention was designed, ZXM mapped the current state of the project — how work was being defined, how decisions were being made, and where handoffs between the business and the development team were breaking down.

The project had no mechanism for converting business intent into work the team could act on. Requirements were being elaborated indefinitely without a prioritisation forcing function, which produced the accumulation of analysis without output. The team also lacked clearly defined roles with the authority to make decisions at the work level. The Scrum Master and Product Owner functions existed in name but not in practice. Without those roles operating, the team had no way to protect its own capacity or negotiate the backlog with stakeholders.

The diagnostic confirmed: the constraint was structural, not motivational. The team was capable. The operating conditions were not.

What changed

ZXM redesigned the operating conditions for the project in three stages.

The team first received a structured one-day immersion in Scrum — combining conceptual grounding with game-based simulation to accelerate practical understanding. This was not training for its own sake; it was the prerequisite for the structural changes that followed.

A stakeholder workshop then reconfigured how business priorities were established. Key decision-makers worked through UX-based prioritisation activities — persona identification, card sorting, and target diagrams — to produce the first ranked Product Backlog. Priority-setting shifted from a negotiation between individuals to a structured, evidence-informed process, with business stakeholders directly accountable for the output.

ZXM then applied behavioural modelling techniques to develop the Scrum Master and Product Owner roles, focusing coaching on the specific decision points and interactions that determine whether those roles function — the events where role boundaries are either held or dissolved. Within three months, both roles were operating at a level of unconscious competence.