Capability Building · EST. 2011 · APAC

Agile capability scaled to 200 people across a federal department. Built to outlast the engagement.

The Situation

The Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources had been using agile methods across a number of delivery areas for several years. Capability maturity varied significantly across the Division — teams had different levels of experience, working rhythms were inconsistent, and the portfolio had no common mechanism for making work visible or decisions transparent. The CIO engaged ZXM to diagnose the structural conditions preventing the Division from operating as a coherent delivery system, and to build the internal capability needed to change that.

What the diagnostic found

Before any capability framework was designed, ZXM mapped the Division’s existing delivery patterns — how teams were structured, how work was sequenced, and how decisions about priorities were being made.

The primary finding was structural: there was no shared operating rhythm connecting the Division’s teams to a common set of priorities. Three conditions produced this. First, each area had developed its own ways of working independently, which meant agile methods were being applied inconsistently and without a shared language. Second, there was no portfolio-level mechanism for making strategic priorities visible — leadership could not readily see what was being worked on or why. Third, because there was no structured planning process connecting teams to strategy, capability development was being driven by individual project needs rather than system-level design.

The result was that teams could not build on each other’s experience, and the Division could not demonstrate to the CIO that delivery was aligned to its most important work.

What changed

The intervention targeted the Division’s operating architecture, not individual team behaviour. ZXM worked with the CIO and General Managers to design a portfolio framework that made work visible at the Division level for the first time. A dedicated pipeline team was established as a product management function, responsible for developing and curating the feature backlog and presenting it to leadership for prioritisation using a weighted shortest job first framework. This gave the leadership group a structured mechanism for directing capacity toward the highest-value work — and a common vocabulary for those decisions.

ZXM then delivered coaching to three pilot teams, with the explicit intent of building enough shared experience to validate the framework before scaling. The pilot was designed to test the operating model, not to produce a template to distribute. Once the pilot confirmed what worked, the capability framework was extended progressively across additional teams each planning horizon. The design principle throughout was to bring the work to the teams, not the teams to the work.

What held

Within twelve months, over 200 people across the Division were participating in the Horizon Planning events. The portfolio framework became the primary mechanism through which work was made transparent, prioritised, and managed across the Division — not a parallel process, but the operating standard.

Measurable improvement in agile maturity was recorded within three months of the pilot teams beginning. On the strength of those early results, leadership extended the framework to additional programs each planning cycle, which meant the capability model scaled through demonstrated success rather than mandated rollout. By the end of the engagement, the CIO had the visibility across the Division’s program of work that the diagnostic had identified as missing at the outset.

The operating rhythm, prioritisation discipline, and portfolio transparency built during this engagement were structural changes. The Division was not dependent on ZXM to sustain them.