Decreased risk with agile product management at AUSTRAC

Coaching a financial intelligence agency to reduce risk, enhance transparency through agile product management capability.

The Situation

Zen Ex Machina was engaged to assist AUSTRAC with their compliance with the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) Digital Service Standard (DSS).

Key to a successful outcome was decreasing the risk of their product management through improved transparency of dependencies, critical milestones, the cost of delay and improved stakeholder engagement.

The Solution

Training the teams and creating a Product Backlog

ZXM first trained the team on the essentials of Scrum. This was a three day session combining core agile and Scrum processes with game-based play and simulation to enable rapid assimilation of concepts including:

How is product management different from project management?
What is the role of a Product Owner in Scrum?
What does a Product Manager do?
Design thinking, and how to make use of contemporary customer experience research and discovery frameworks in an agile environment.
How does Lean UX fit into an agile environment.
Prioritisation techniques – adopting prioritisation by value and moving away from non-economic models such as “HiPPO” and “Squeaky Wheel”.

By day three, teams had produced enough Product Backlog Items and a Product Roadmap, sufficient to commence their first Sprint without the need for a Sprint Zero.

A storymap was created by day 3 along with a portfolio Roadmap detailing forecast of Features for products for the short, medium and long term.

The Results

ZXM's coaching of agile teams reinforced the need to create transparency of digital product development that empowered business stakeholders to become the key drivers of value in their product development lifecycle.

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