Value Optimisation · EST. 2011 · APAC

200 people. 20 cross-functional teams. Quarterly planning moved fully virtual in under three weeks.

The Situation

The Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources (DISER) engaged ZXM to redesign their quarterly Program Increment (PI) Planning event for fully virtual delivery — moving twenty cross-functional teams and up to 200 participants from a face-to-face big room format to a 100% remote environment in under three weeks, with no reduction in planning fidelity.

The trigger was COVID-19, but the challenge was structural. PI Planning depends on dense, real-time negotiation between teams, immediate dependency resolution, and programme-level synthesis — none of which translate automatically to a video call. DISER had previously run hybrid planning events with some distributed participants, but a fully virtual format at this scale introduced constraints around bandwidth, collaboration tooling, coordination overhead, and participant fatigue that had not been solved before.

What the diagnostic found

Before any agenda or tooling was designed, ZXM mapped the existing PI Planning format to identify which structural dependencies would break under a virtual constraint and which would survive intact.

The primary finding was that the in-person format embedded coordination in physical proximity — team tables, walking the program board, ad hoc dependency conversations in hallways. These were not incidental; they were load-bearing. Removing them without replacement would produce a planning event that generated individual team plans but failed to produce a coherent program board. Three structural conditions compounded this: there was no established virtual equivalent for cross-team negotiation; the technology stack had not been tested at 200-person scale on the agency’s standard operating environment; and the shift from a two-day physical event to a two-day screen-based event introduced cognitive load that would degrade plan quality if not actively managed.

What changed

ZXM redesigned the planning architecture — not just the agenda. Every in-person coordination mechanism was mapped to a virtual equivalent and tested before the event ran.

Digital team boards were built in Microsoft Teams for each of the twenty teams and for the programme level. Virtual team tables were established via Cisco WebEx, functioning as the structural equivalent of physical team spaces — available throughout the event for cross-team dependency resolution. The agenda was restructured to include explicit recovery time, which addressed the cognitive load problem and reduced the risk of decision fatigue degrading late-day plan quality. Briefing sessions were run with each team in advance so that the format, tooling, and logistics were understood before the planning day began — removing the coordination overhead that would otherwise have consumed time that should have been spent on planning. A dedicated tech support role was built into the facilitation structure, separate from the content facilitation, so that technical issues were isolated and resolved without disrupting the planning rhythm.

What held

Twenty teams completed a coherent program board across two virtual days, with high confidence votes recorded across all programme areas and very few unresolved risks or issues at close.

The bandwidth held at 200-person scale on the agency’s standard operating environment — a constraint that had been treated as a genuine risk before the event. The program board became a live operational artefact: teams continued updating plans and tracking progress through the delivery sprint, with the virtual board functioning as the primary coordination mechanism between planning cycles. Cross-team dependency negotiations that were not fully resolved on the day continued into delivery — which is the expected behaviour of a well-run PI Planning event. The conversations were initiated, not deferred.

The model built for this event was adopted as the baseline for the next horizon planning session, with lessons captured and applied to the next iteration. The constraint was not the technology. It was the absence of a coordination architecture designed for virtual delivery — and that was solvable.