Capability Building · EST. 2011 · APAC

Six design teams, working in silos. A 250% productivity gain when the silos came down.

The Situation

The Australian Taxation Office’s Digital Experience Branch engaged ZXM to design and embed an agile operating model across its design studio — a cross-functional unit spanning video production, animation, UI, UX, and visual design. The studio served internal ATO clients and other government agencies, with six teams and outputs ranging from broadcast-quality video to print design and digital artefacts. The brief was to build the operating capability within the studio itself, not just configure a process.

What the diagnostic found

Before any operating model was designed, ZXM mapped the current state of work across all six teams — how work entered, how it was prioritised, who made decisions, and where re-work was generated. The primary finding: the studio had no shared mechanism for surfacing or resolving competing priorities. Each team operated independently, which made cross-team demand visible only at the point of failure. Directors were absorbing prioritisation decisions that their teams had no line of sight to, which produced re-work rates that eroded capacity across the studio without the cause being traceable to any single team or function.

What changed

The intervention targeted the operating model at two levels simultaneously. At the director level, ZXM worked with managers to shift from activity oversight to demand governance — using structured prioritisation disciplines to establish visible decision-making that teams could work against. At the team level, ZXM introduced differentiated frameworks matched to work type: Scrum for time-boxed, iterative creative work; Kanban for continuous service-type outputs.

Cross-team collaboration was structured through Scrum of Scrums, and capability transfer was designed so that knowledge moved through communities of practice rather than through manager-held expertise. The operating model was built to be product-agnostic, so that broadcast video, print design, and digital artefacts could be managed through a consistent system without forcing incompatible cadences on fundamentally different work types.

What held

Within nine months, 250% productivity gains were measured across teams, with re-work reduced by 80%. All six teams were operating under chosen frameworks — Scrum, Lean, and Kanban — matched to the nature of their output. Management overhead decreased as directors moved from absorbing day-to-day prioritisation into governing demand at the portfolio level. The ATO’s design studio now delivers digital and design outcomes to internal ATO areas and other government agencies on a continuous basis. The operating model that replaced the studio’s informal arrangements has not required external support to sustain.