Capability Building · EST. 2011 · APAC
Six weeks. Twelve branches. Incoming Government Briefs for both parties delivered on time.
The Situation
The Department of Industry engaged ZXM to embed iterative delivery practices into the Incoming Government Brief (IGB) taskforce — a cross-functional team of policy officers drawn from twelve branches of the department. The taskforce faced a hard deadline: a Federal election. The “Red Book” and “Blue Book” — detailed briefings prepared for both major political parties — had to be written, iterated, and finalised within six weeks. This was the department’s first agile initiative outside software development.
What the diagnostic found
Before any method was selected, ZXM read how the branches were currently working. The primary finding was structural: policy documentation was flowing sequentially through branches, each waiting for the previous to complete before contributing. Twelve teams operating in isolation could not align their outputs to a single coherent brief.
The bottleneck was coordination architecture, not team capability. Individual branches were producing high-quality work; the system connecting them was not designed for the speed the election timeline demanded.
What changed
ZXM redesigned the coordination model. A Kanban-based workflow replaced the sequential handoff pattern, giving the IGB leads real-time visibility across all twelve branches simultaneously. Policy iterations were scoped and timebox-aligned so that drafts from each branch fed a shared pipeline rather than accumulating in silos. Lean principles governed the removal of wait time between review cycles. The taskforce could see its collective progress for the first time — and adjust in real time.
What held
Both the Red Book and Blue Book were delivered within the six-week window. Cycle time for briefing paper iterations dropped from weeks-per-pass to days. Twelve branches maintained alignment across the full delivery period without requiring centralised sign-off at each handoff. The constraint was the coordination model. Changing it changed the outcome.
Six-week delivery
Both incoming government briefs delivered inside a hard election deadline. No slippage.
Twelve branches aligned
Policy teams across twelve branches synchronised around a shared delivery pipeline for the first time.
Agile beyond technology
Kanban and Lean applied to policy work, building a repeatable capability the department retained after the engagement.
