Value Optimisation · EST. 2011 · APAC

Work queuing for 52 days before it moved. Lead time cut to 17, cycle time halved.

The Situation

The Australian Taxation Office engaged ZXM to diagnose why its MC Identity Matching (MCID) shared service was failing to hold its delivery commitments. MCID was a critical integration point for several major programmes across the ATO — and because of that centrality, its delays cascaded outward. Lead time on individual work items had stretched to over 52 days on average, with some items taking longer than three months to complete.

The team was not struggling with effort or intent. The architecture of how work entered, was prioritised, and moved through the system was producing the delays — and that distinction mattered for what came next.

Reduce handovers

Reduce lead time by reducing the impact of multiple handovers between traditional silos.

Improve workforce effectiveness

Minimise the impact of "urgent" work and context switching on productivity and strategic delivery priorities.

Focus on value creation

Re-prioritise the focus on value-based metrics over work with no relative business value.

What the diagnostic found

Before any changes were proposed, ZXM mapped how work actually moved through MCID — from point of request to completion. Three structural conditions were producing the delays.

First, there was no single intake mechanism. Work arrived from multiple programmes through informal channels, which meant prioritisation decisions were reactive and inconsistent. Second, the team was carrying far more concurrent work than its capacity could sustain, which pushed cycle time up and reduced throughput on every item. Third, the team had no shared visibility of what was in progress, which made it impossible for leadership to understand where commitments were at risk until they had already slipped.

The leadership had been considering broader frameworks-based transformation, but faced significant change resistance. ZXM recommended a different approach: target the structural conditions directly, without disrupting existing delivery commitments in the process.

What changed

The intervention targeted the three structural conditions the diagnostic had identified. A single intake point was established, so that all work requests from across the ATO entered MCID through one mechanism and were evaluated against a consistent set of criteria before entering the delivery queue. Work-in-progress limits were introduced to bring the volume of concurrent items to within the team’s actual capacity, which reduced the context-switching that had been fragmenting effort across too many items simultaneously. A Kanban board made the state of all active work visible to the team and to leadership in real time, which meant that risks to commitments could be identified and addressed before they became delays.

Sprint Goals aligned to longer-term programme objectives gave the team a shared focus for each iteration. Prioritisation shifted from urgency-driven to value-driven, with cost of delay as the organising principle for sequencing work.

What held

Lead time dropped from 52 days to 17 days within three months. Cycle time fell from 20 days to 10 — a 50% reduction. The structural changes held because they addressed the intake and flow architecture, not surface-level behaviours. A team that had been failing to hold its delivery commitments became a reliable integration point for the programmes it served.