ATO · 25% productivity, 60% fewer defects

The Situation

The ATO engaged ZXM to design and lead the agile transition for one of its largest public-facing programme deliveries — a branch spanning 23 delivery areas that had operated under a traditional stage-gate model. The executive wanted the programme running on an iterative delivery model by 2018, with the goal of compressing delivery cycles, improving collaboration between business and technology stakeholders, and reducing late-stage defect rates.

ZXM was brought in at the executive level to work with the branch leadership team on transition strategy, team design, and the operating rhythm required to sustain agile ways of working at scale.

What the diagnostic found

Before any redesign was scoped, ZXM mapped the programme’s current delivery architecture — how work was structured, how decisions moved through the chain, and where the handover points between business and technology were breaking down. The primary finding was that the operating model was not designed to support the iterative, cross-functional delivery the programme required.

Three structural conditions were producing the visible symptoms. Delivery authority was fragmented across 23 areas with no shared prioritisation mechanism, which meant programme-level trade-offs could not be made at pace. Business and technology stakeholders were engaged at fixed-point handovers rather than continuously, producing misalignment that only surfaced at release time. And testing integration was positioned late in the delivery cycle, so defects that could have been caught at team level accumulated until they became programme-level risk.

What changed

The intervention targeted the operating model, not the teams. ZXM worked with the executive and directors to build a programme-wide prioritisation mechanism — a single product backlog owned by the Programme Management Group, with a pipeline team responsible for developing features across the 23 delivery areas. This gave the programme a shared view of work in flight for the first time.

At team level, ZXM embedded Scrum as the baseline delivery rhythm and introduced Definition of Done criteria that required defects to be resolved within the sprint before work could be considered complete. This shifted defect resolution from a late-programme clean-up activity to a continuous, team-level discipline. Scaling patterns were introduced progressively as teams matured — not pre-scoped up front.

Executives, directors, and teams received targeted coaching in lean leadership, delivery cadence, and portfolio alignment — designed to build internal capability rather than create dependency on external support. ZXM developed and transferred shared artefacts, role definitions, and operating guides to create consistency across the programme from the outset.

What held

Productivity across agile teams increased by 25%. The shift was attributable to faster decision-making at team level — less duplication, fewer handovers, and clearer ownership of delivery outcomes. Downstream defects for the TT18 Q2 release dropped by 60% compared to the equivalent 2017 release.

The improvement held in 2019, confirming the change was structural rather than circumstantial. Several other ATO programmes adopted agile delivery approaches as a result, and ZXM worked with ATO staff in key roles — Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Release Train Engineers, and Product Managers — to transfer capability that outlasted the engagement. The artefacts and operating guides built during the transition became shared standards across ATO programmes, contributing to enterprise-wide delivery consistency.