The Situation
WA Police was responding to a genuine strategic pressure: the need to become more digitally responsive while protecting the continuity of critical frontline policing operations. Their ICT portfolio had operated on a waterfall delivery model — a model designed for stable, well-defined requirements that struggled to absorb the pace of change the organisation now needed.
WA Police engaged ZXM to diagnose their operating context and design a practical pathway to scaled lean-agile delivery. The scope was not a pilot. The brief was enterprise-wide: establish the internal infrastructure to run and sustain their own agile transformation, without ongoing dependency on external consultants.
What changed
Before any design work began, ZXM mapped WA Police’s existing portfolio governance, delivery structures, and leadership decision-making patterns to identify where scaled agile practices would fit, where they would require adaptation, and where the organisation’s unique operational context demanded something different.
Training leadership and change agents
WA Police’s transformation required its own people to carry it. ZXM provided training — delivered by accredited SAFe® Programme Consultants — to over 100 participants across leadership and the ICT portfolio change agent cohort. Training covered the underlying lean and agile principles, not just the mechanics of the framework, because WA Police needed practitioners who could reason about what they were doing, not just follow a recipe. Awareness sessions followed for a broader agency audience.
Building the internal change body
The structural centre of the transformation was the Lean-Agile Centre of Excellence (LACE) — a team chartered within the ICT portfolio to own the enterprise change programme. ZXM coached the LACE as a Scrum team, working through their organisational change backlog in an agile cadence. LEGO® Serious Play® was used to surface and structure the LACE’s initial strategic backlog — a facilitation approach designed to make implicit organisational knowledge explicit and debatable. Ongoing coaching maintained delivery discipline and gave the LACE the transparency mechanisms to manage work in-flow.
Tailoring the framework to context
The framework itself was designed for WA Police’s operating environment, not adopted wholesale. The base was Essential SAFe®, extended with Portfolio SAFe® scaling patterns drawn from comparable complex organisations. ZXM and the LACE built the implementation plan for the first Agile Release Train (ART), developed supporting artefacts, guidebooks, templates, and process guidelines, and equipped the LACE to operate without external support once the implementation phase was complete.
What held
WA Police launched a scaled agile framework and an internal LACE equipped to run the transformation without external dependency. The executive engaged directly with portfolio prioritisation — over 30 strategic initiatives evaluated against economic value and risk for the first time as a unified decision-making group. Portfolio and Programme Kanbans were established to give the organisation end-to-end visibility of work from strategic intent to delivery. The capability built was designed to persist: the LACE had the training, the tools, and the operating rhythm to continue without ZXM.
An internal LACE launched and self-sufficient. Over 30 strategic initiatives prioritised by value. 100+ practitioners trained to carry the transformation forward.
30+ initiatives prioritised
Executive cohort made transparent, value-based decisions across the portfolio for the first time.
Internally led from day one
The LACE owned the transformation backlog and drove the change programme as a self-organising Scrum team.
100+ practitioners trained
Leadership and change agents trained in lean-agile principles by accredited SAFe® Programme Consultants.
