The Department of Industry has been using agile methods, including Scrum, Lean and Kanban to deliver projects for some time however the capability maturity of agile project delivery varies across the Department.
ZXM worked with CIO and General managers to develop the Agile framework for transition across the whole organisation and worked closely with leadership team to develop Product backlog, prioritise strategic initiatives and develop agile transition plan and roadmap for implementation.
The coaching engagement was, designed to leverage ZXM’s experience in delivering agile projects at scale across government agencies to create the following outcomes:
ZXM program agile coaches delivered training and coaching for the initial 3 pilot teams. After a successful pilot, ZXM helped to scale the agile framework across the Division.
ZXM helped the leadership team to develop a portfolio framework to get visibility and transparency of all the work being undertaken by the different areas. A pipeline team was set up as a Product Management team to develop features and provide these to the leadership for prioritisation using a weighted shortest job first (WSJF) framework. This enabled leadership to make decision on priorities based on strategic importance to the organisation. The intent was to build agile capability and maturity and develop long lived high performing teams. The mantra was to “bring the work to the teams” not the ”teams to the work”
Once a priority order was established, capacity planning in preparation for launch of first horizon planning event was undertaken and teams held their first collaborative planning at a program level.
ZXM’s coaching at the Department demonstrated that capability maturity and cultural change are built iteratively and incrementally and by focusing on continuous improvement was able to see results with the team within 3 months. This reinforced our “start small” with the basics of agile and the agile principles pattern of working. We were mindful to use a pragmatic approach to get the right the balance between building knowledge, teaching people new agile techniques, and the need to ensure these are effective.
The Agile leadership team succeeded in delivering the CIOs desired outcome of creating greater transparency of work across the Division and ensuring that teams are focused on delivering the highest value work. It has become the principle way that work is made transparent, prioritised, planned and managed across the Division.
Within the 12 months of this engagement, there is improvement in Industry’s overall agile maturity. On the strength of the results achieved in the initial planning horizons, the agile framework was extended to additional programs and teams. Each horizon, additional teams were included until after 12 months the majority of the Division were participating with over 200 people involved in the ‘Horizon Planning’ events.
Iteratively built maturity and capability and lead to cultural change across the division
General managers had agreed priorities aligned to strategic needs
Improved transparency and visibility of the entire program of work
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.
Creating an agile capability delivery for Census 2021 to improve transparency, decrease rework, and improve the overall alignment of activities across the entire program.
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
ZXM’s agile coaching supported the agency to reduce their time to deliver government briefing papers from many months to just weeks.
Virtual big room planning events in SAFe® need a greater focus on communication to ensure that the same level of collaboration is achieved and can be done successfully through effective use of virtual tables, digital planning tools and chat rooms.
W.A. Police needed to rapidly scale in an environment of significant constraint and risk in a way that wouldn’t impact business-as-usual while rapidly building scaled agile capability.
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Copyright © Zen Ex Machina® and ™ (2021). All rights reserved. ABN 93 153 194 220
Copyright © Zen Ex Machina® and ™ (2021). All rights reserved. ABN 93 153 194 220
