Building Agile Capability at Scale for ABS 2021 Census
Scaling agile for product development delivery to support major five year program
The Situation
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) was in the initial stages of planning its Census 2021 program and traditionally this program is delivered in waterfall stages over a five year cycle period which is heavily weighted towards up front planning an design in the first few years. The previous Census program had issues during implementation and collection of Census data and therefore the Executive were looking to adopt and agile approach to decrease program risks and engaged ZXM to undertake agile coaching and training support to help develop and support its staff – from Directors through to teams –to work smarter.
Specifically, agile was seen as a key enabler regarding its change in focus for Census 2021, including:
- Adopting a customer-centric approach and aligning to the Digital Transformation Agency’s (DTA) Digital Service Standards (DSS).
- Improving the way the whole program operates – from strategic and inviting innovative thinking through to its tactics and operations.
- Identifying opportunities for creating horizontal integration between teams and improving collaboration across major streams of work to understand the value streams across the program.
- Providing quicker feedback loops to support economic decision making on value and investment of people’s time.
The Solution
ZXM’s approach was to consider the risks in agile adoption with the Census Executive for the 2021 Census. The cultural change and management support were identified as key risks, and so ZXM worked with the executive and the Directors to practice Scrum to understand and experience agile for themselves so that they would be in the best position to support and promote agile adoption in their own teams.
We helped them visualise their backlog of work and prioritise based on value. ZXM developed an implementation roadmap and assessed baseline agile capability and maturity. ZXM coaches then helped form and roll out agile teams across the Census program.
Over a period of 12 months working with the 2021 Census program for a year into its 5-year program., ZXM helped them to implement:
- Coached the PMO and Product Management on effective mechanisms for visual management across the 12 workstreams, including using smaller batch sizes to be more transparent on day-to-day outcomes and dependencies that could impact other areas of the program.
- Program-wide prioritisation for work across the program.
- Improved communication, collaboration and transparency between its workstream leads through the use of Kanban and stand-ups on a weekly cycle.
- Improved the visibility of dependencies and risk across key areas in the program through roadmapping
- Established 20 new teams and trained team leads to take on the role of Product Owner.
- Delivered training across the country in other program areas in the ABS, such as Geospatial Data, to work in agile ways to enhance their interaction with the 2021 Census program.
The Results
ZXM’s experience in agile at scale across government enabled the 2021 Census program to quickly establish mechanisms to prioritise and visualise work and to create feedback loops between the strategic, the tactical and delivery layers of the program.
The patterns and practices introduced to the 2021 Census with respect to prioritisation of work and establishing a cadence of planning and review across all layers of the forward work program helped them identify where they could potentially iteratively and incrementally developed work products for the program earlier than previous years. The initial success of this agile implementation saw the adoption of agile as their approach of choice to deliver the Marriage Law survey in 2018.
Improved Prioritisation
Single prioritised list of initiatives
80% improvement in alignment
Improved Transparency
Improvement in transparency and visibility of the entire program of work
Decreased Rework
50% higher quality through replacing "stage gates" with Definition of Done
Related Case Studies
Cost Reduction using Scaled Agile across a Major Program of Work
Within 12 months, ZXM helped the program’s costs to reduce and its productivity to increase through a focus on quality and agility.
Setting up a Product Management Group (PMG)
Setting up a Product Management Group provided visibility of the whole pipeline in priority order across the whole program and clear governance around responsibilities and decision making process
Better Integration and Cross Train Delivery using Nexus
To improve coordination of dependencies with external teams in different branches, the Nexus framework was able to scale to meet this need for end to end integration of delivery for organisation wide product initiatives.
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