CASE STUDY · EST. 2011 · APAC
Delivery rhythm established across a regulator. The cadence changed; the responsiveness followed.
The Situation
The Clean Energy Regulator’s (CER) ICT programme was delivering. The question was whether it was delivering the right things, fast enough, in ways the business could trust. CER engaged ZXM to diagnose the delivery system and design an operating model that would give the agency’s teams, managers, and executives a shared platform for prioritisation, collaboration, and improvement.
The programme spanned multiple teams across IT and business domains. CER’s leadership had already committed to an agile direction — the gap was in making that commitment operational in a way that would last beyond any consulting engagement.
What the diagnostic found
Before any delivery model was designed, ZXM mapped the existing operating architecture across CER’s IT programme. Three conditions were producing the delivery friction the agency was experiencing.
First, portfolio-level prioritisation was not functioning as a genuine decision mechanism. Competing demands reached teams without having been resolved at programme level, which meant delivery effort was frequently redirected mid-cycle rather than committed in advance.
Second, business stakeholders were downstream observers rather than active participants in delivery. Features were built against requirements that had not been tested with the people who would ultimately use them, which produced rework at integration stages and eroded confidence in delivery timelines.
Third, management’s role in the delivery system was undefined. Without a clear function in the operating model, managers defaulted to status reporting rather than impediment removal — which left teams carrying structural problems they could not resolve independently.
The same pattern has held across ZXM’s government engagements: the constraint is rarely in the teams. It is in the operating architecture around them.
What changed
ZXM worked with CER’s executive, management, and teams to redesign the operating architecture around three structural conditions identified in the diagnostic.
Portfolio prioritisation was restructured through the System Owners Representative Group (SORG), giving business owners an active governance role in programme-level investment decisions. This replaced ad hoc demand with a cadenced mechanism for resolving competing priorities before they reached delivery teams.
Business stakeholders moved from recipients to participants. System owners joined Agile Release Train events, contributed to feature definition, and attended Sprint Reviews and Release Train system demos. The result was faster feedback and significantly fewer late-stage rework cycles as features were validated against actual business need before integration.
Managers were equipped for a specific function in the delivery system: supporting agile teams as Lean Leaders. One-on-one coaching gave CER’s managers a practical role in identifying and removing impediments rather than escalating them, which reduced the cycle time between a team surface an issue and it being resolved.
What held
After twelve months, CER’s IT programme operated on a leaner and more responsive footing than at any point in the preceding planning cycle. Portfolio decisions were being made at programme level rather than absorbed as competing team priorities. The business systems roadmap became a living instrument rather than a static planning artefact, adjusting to changes in technology, business need, and the agency’s regulatory domain as they occurred.
Feedback loops shortened. Business stakeholders in delivery events meant that the cost of a wrong assumption was measured in days, not months. Delivery risk decreased as transparency through the IT Governance Framework improved, making the state of the programme visible to decision-makers who previously relied on status reports.
The capability built during the engagement remained embedded. CER’s managers and teams were operating the delivery system independently by the end of the twelve-month period — which was the measure of success that mattered.
Business-IT fusion
Business stakeholders moved from observers to active participants in delivery — writing features, attending Release Train events, and reviewing working software at Sprint cadence.
Faster feedback loops
Assumptions were tested at delivery cadence rather than integration stage. The cost of a wrong decision fell from months to days.
Governance visibility
The IT Governance Framework gained programme-wide visibility, giving decision-makers a reliable picture of delivery state and reducing the risk carried by the agency.
