WA Police was on a journey to be more digitally connected, more responsive to community needs and to deliver more valuable outcomes faster, at less cost.
Having recognised that their waterfall approach for ICT project delivery struggled to meet rapidly changing needs, WA Police explored Lean-Agile frameworks, starting with their PMO.
Zen Ex Machina was engaged to assist them in tailoring the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®) to support their unique portfolio delivery needs, while not jeopardising work vital to the support of critical frontline policing activities.
Drawing on our deep knowledge of government and experience with SAFe®, ZXM supported WA police as they took their first steps along their implementation roadmap.
ZXM provided SAFe® training by accredited SAFe® Program Consultants. We used a collaborative and hands-on approach to train over 100 participants in the underlying Lean and Agile principles of SAFe®, and SAFe’s® roles and practices. Training focussed first on leadership across the agency and change agents within the ICT portfolio, and was followed by additional knowledge sessions to a wider agency audience to raise awareness of the value of agile frameworks, their key concepts, and benefits.
To drive the WA Police transformation to the Lean-Agile way of working using SAFe®, a Lean-Agile Centre of Excellence (LACE) team was established within their ITC portfolio. The objectives of their LACE team included defining the selected practices from SAFe® and other Agile frameworks appropriate for the needs of WA Police, and developing the implementation plan to launch an Agile Release Train (ART).
ZXM utilised facilitation techniques including LEGO® Serious Play® to workshop the LACE team’s initial Backlog of organisational change. Ongoing ZXM coaching supported the LACE as a Scrum Team to deliver the enterprise transformation objectives in an agile way and promote transparency through visualisation of work in-flow.
ZXM worked collaboratively with the LACE and stakeholders to develop a scaled agile approach tailored to their context. The WA Police framework utilised Essential SAFe®, plus pragmatic use of Portfolio SAFe® scaling patterns successful in other highly complex organisations.
We boosted the LACE team’s ongoing activities to implement the framework with workshop facilitation and by developing supporting artefacts, guidebooks, templates, process guidelines, and communication tools.
With strategic, portfolio-level initiatives identified and documented by the LACE using practices from Evidence Based Management (EBM), ZXM then supported the CIO to engage with his executive peers. This was the first time the executive had gathered to openly and transparently discuss as a single cohort how to prioritise initiatives based on cost of delay, value and risk.
Agility from executive direction through to delivery teams
LACE team supported business and executives in aligning over 30 initiatives for prioritisation based on value.
No strategy by PowerPoint. A framework designed by expert practitioners that was practical, fit-for-purpose, and immediately actionable.
After 12 months, CER had improved transparency of prioritised projects and improvements in collaboration with business stakeholders and was able to be more responsive to changes in business needs and changes in its regulatory domain.
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.
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 brought significant cost savings to the ATO through transforming 23 delivery areas to agile.
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.
ZXM’s agile coaching supported the agency to reduce their time to deliver government briefing papers from many months to just weeks.
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