Capability Building · EST. 2011 · APAC
An entire leadership team brought up to speed in a single day. Framework literacy, built to apply immediately.
The Situation
The Australian National Maritime Museum faced a practical problem: their teams were working with different frameworks but had no shared understanding of how those frameworks compared, where each applied, or why they had been designed the way they had. Before the museum committed to any particular approach, they needed their people — across software and non-software teams — to start from the same foundation.
The National Maritime Museum engaged ZXM to design and deliver a structured, single-day capability session that would build that foundation. The constraint was time. A multi-day programme was not an option, and a traditional lecture-based course would not produce the depth of understanding the museum needed to make sound decisions about how their agile journey should proceed.
What the diagnostic found
Before the session was designed, ZXM mapped the participant landscape — the types of teams involved, the work they did, and the frameworks already in informal use across the organisation. The diagnostic confirmed a consistent pattern: people held strong opinions about specific practices without a structural understanding of the frameworks those practices came from.
That gap was producing two consequences. First, framework selection conversations were circular — teams debated tactics rather than evaluating approaches against the nature of their work. Second, the museum had no shared vocabulary, which meant coordination between teams required repeated explanation of basic concepts that should have been common ground.
The session design followed the diagnosis directly. ZXM built the day around experiential learning rather than lecture delivery. Scrum was run as a live simulation using the LEGO Scrum Game, which placed participants inside the framework rather than describing it from the outside. Kanban and Lean were introduced through flow visualisation exercises. Each framework was positioned in relation to the others, so participants left with a mental model — not just a vocabulary list.
The curriculum covered agile origins, including the Deming Cycle and the New New Product Development Game, the Agile Manifesto, the mechanics and values of Scrum, Kanban and Lean, and common approaches to scaling delivery beyond a single team. Every concept was anchored to a practical decision the museum would face in choosing how to work.
What held
Participants across software and non-software teams reached a shared baseline of understanding in a single day — a foundation that would have taken weeks of self-directed learning to approximate. The museum left with the capability to make an informed framework selection across both development and operational work, with all stakeholders using consistent terminology from the same starting point.
The lasting result was not the training itself. The museum could now govern its own agile journey: evaluating frameworks against the type of work each team did, rather than defaulting to a single approach or relying on external guidance to translate between competing methods. That shift in ownership is what a single day of well-designed capability building produces when the diagnosis shapes the design.
Framework clarity
Participants left with a structured mental model of how Scrum, Kanban and Lean relate — not just a vocabulary list.
Informed framework selection
A shared baseline allowed the museum to choose the right approach for each team type rather than defaulting to a one-size-fits-all method.
One day, full coverage
A simulation-led, play-based curriculum compressed what typically takes three days into one without losing depth or retention.
