Strategy & Advisory · EST. 2011 · APAC

A policy framework that would have taken months, built and agreed in one week.

The situation

When COVID-19 struck in early 2020, the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science needed to move fast. The CIO’s division had been working with ZXM to develop agile delivery capability at scale — and when the crisis hit, the CIO asked ZXM to embed directly into the department’s internal response taskforce.

The taskforce — formed as an Executive Action Team (EAT) — brought together senior staff from across IT, People, Property and Communications. Its mandate was clear: develop new policy, frameworks and procedures quickly, with input from multiple groups across the enterprise, and communicate every change out to thousands of staff with speed and accuracy. ZXM was asked to operate as Scrum Master for the EAT, providing the structural discipline needed for a cross-functional executive team to move at crisis pace without losing quality or transparency.

What changed

The first thing ZXM mapped was the information flow problem. With policy direction changing by the day and senior decision-makers scattered across multiple divisions, the EAT had no shared structure for identifying priorities, tracking decisions, or making progress visible. The constraint was not commitment — it was the absence of a lightweight operating model designed for the pace and stakes of a crisis response.

ZXM worked with the EAT executive to establish a virtual Kanban board surfacing the most valuable items for the taskforce to pursue, with progress visible to the broader division in real time. A Daily Scrum event set the plan for the next 24 hours. Two additional daily check-ins captured the rapid flow of new information — from inside the EAT and from the broader division — so that momentum was neither lost nor wasted as priorities shifted.

As staff moved to remote work, ZXM adapted the operating model in real time. Each daily planning cycle produced a concrete, achievable set of outcomes — practical action cards and checklists developed for managers, ready to distribute within 24 hours of the work being identified as a priority. The cadence held because the structure held: transparent priorities, daily alignment, and a clear line between what the EAT decided and what the broader organisation received.

What held

New policy frameworks were developed and communicated across the division within the first week of crisis activation. Over the following weeks the EAT continued to respond to evolving policy requirements, consulting stakeholders from every group within the division without losing the cadence that the daily operating model had established. Decisions were visible as they were made. Changes reached staff through multiple digital channels within hours of approval.

The engagement also marked the first time the department’s agile operating discipline moved outside the CIO group. Staff from IT, People, Property and Communications worked inside a shared cadence structure for the duration of the crisis — an early signal that the capability could scale beyond technology delivery into enterprise-wide coordination. The operating model did the work. The people already had the capability to use it.