ZXM was engaged by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) to help them develop transition to agile ways of working and develop their agile capabilities at scale. One of the ATO’s largest public program. This program had traditionally been delivered using a waterfall approach and the Executive wanted to move the program towards an agile framework in 2018 in order to improve speed of delivery, collaboration between business and EST stakeholders as well improve quality and value delivered.
ZXM was engaged by the Executive to work with the leadership team to develop the strategy for the rollout of agile across the branch. The Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) , was to be transitioned across over 23 delivery areas with Scrum being the approach at the team-level.
The ZXM team worked collaboratively with Executive and Directors to develop and implement the agile transition strategy. Rather than spend months scoping a whole program, we started with a few initial agile teams. Once learnings have been gathered from these initial teams and their initial agile practices, we worked with leadership to scale to the program to roll out agile across 12 agile teams within 3 months.
We started small with the basic Scrum framework and then added scaling patterns as the teams matured. We were able to fast track agile teams set up by deploying proven support material, including ZXM’s agile checklists, role definitions, and team blueprints to kick-start the program and its teams. Combined with our Agile Essentials training course, we can help new agile teams get started in 48 hours. Our agile transition for the program approach involved:
ZXM’s coaching and support developing and implementing the agile transition for the program resulted in:
This program has continued on their agile journey and in 2019 has continued to improve quality and reduce defects showing this was a repeatable and sustained uplift in capability and delivery.
The success of the program moving to agile, led to a number of other programs across the ATO
moving towards agile approaches. ZXM coaches were able to support building internal capability of ATO
staff in key roles such as Scrum masters, Product Owners, RTE and Product Managers. ZXM actively
shared knowledge and developed artefacts to be shared across ATO programs to provide greater consistency and standardisation of implementation of ATO’s scaled agile framework which is now contributing to the building an enterprise wide capability in agile.
Productivity increase of 25% due to faster team level decisions - more autonomy with less duplication and handovers.
Less over time needed in lead up to the release to fix defects meaning less re-work.
60% decrease in defects within 12 months yielding significantly lower risks for integration
ZXM’s agile coaching supported the agency to reduce their time to deliver government briefing papers from many months to just weeks.
Agile frameworks aren’t just for software teams. This whole Design Studio goes agile with the help of ZXM!
Having business people in the PO role within the agile teams allowed quicker access to business/user expertise that helped with designing and building systems that better meet the needs of clients and business.
ZXM help and support HR leadership to use Kanban with Scrum to deliver their outcomes faster
Value Stream Mapping highlighted to business and the solution development team, where there was duplication and waste and where they could streamline the process and work in parallel to deliver the features faster.
ZXM coached Nestlé’s leadership across marketing, sales, legal, product management and distribution, to work as an agile team to deliver its new product initiative.
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