CASE STUDY · EST. 2011 · APAC

Innovation capability, built to last. Comcare's delivery teams strengthened from the inside.

The Situation

Comcare engaged ZXM to embed an agile operating model across its digital delivery teams, starting with a structured pilot to prove the model before scaling. The agency had invested in agile in name but the structural conditions for it — team self-organisation, continuous improvement, and active business partnership in delivery — were not yet in place. Multiple delivery teams were operating in parallel, carrying the weight of both business-as-usual and project-based work without a consistent framework to manage either.

What the diagnostic found

Before any intervention was designed, ZXM mapped how work was flowing through Comcare’s delivery teams: how items were prioritised, how teams were coordinating, and where decision-making was producing delay. The finding was structural, not attitudinal. Teams lacked a consistent operating rhythm. Business stakeholders were positioned downstream of delivery rather than as active participants in it. Without a shared framework, the gap between what teams were asked to do and what they could reliably produce stayed wide.

What changed

ZXM began with a single pilot team to test the model under real conditions. Scrum was introduced not as a compliance requirement but as a working system — structured through play-based workshops that enabled teams to internalise the mechanics before applying them to live work. Adjacent teams — infrastructure and service support — adopted a Scrum-with-Kanban hybrid to manage the different cadence of their operational and project-based commitments. Each team’s operating model was set up to allow self-organisation to function, rather than simply declaring it as an expectation.

What held

Within weeks of the pilot launching, teams were operating to a consistent delivery rhythm. Work items were being refined before sprint commitment, business stakeholders were participating in reviews rather than receiving reports after the fact, and the infrastructure and service support teams had stabilised their BAU load without it cannibalising project delivery. The structural conditions for self-organisation — clear priorities, visible work, and regular inspect-and-adapt cycles — were producing measurable improvement in delivery predictability.

The capability transferred. Teams did not revert when ZXM stepped back. Comcare’s delivery teams retained the operating model, continued running retrospectives as a genuine improvement mechanism, and maintained the business partnership model that had been designed into the pilot. The constraint had been structural, and the structural change held.