Faster to "go-live"

With a project deadline looming, the Department of Health turned to ZXM to deliver their outcome faster using agile.

The Situation

New initiatives were announced for Hearing Services Online, with a go-live date in a few months. Normally, the scale of this type of initiative would take a year using their traditional linear software development practices.

The Solution

Zen Ex Machina’s agile consultants have deep experience in agile and health, as well as the design thinking required to deliver the project in alignment with the Digital Transition Authority (DTA) Digital Service Standard. We chose Scrum and Kanban to help executive deliver the outcome and commenced training and coaching the project team.

Fast-tracking agile adoption

We supported the team through its first Sprints, fast tracking the adoption of Scrum by using our start up checklists, role definitions, and frameworks. After a day of training, and a day establishing the starting point of the scope for the first Sprint, the team was up and running.

A normal project start-up would have taken them 3-months. We got them up and running in 3 days.

A focus on Product Owners and Roadmaps

We coached the Development Team through its key events for iterative planning and then switched to coaching the business’ Product Owner to create and manage a roadmap that forecast the features necessary to deliver the program’s new initiatives. The roadap provided strategic direction for the project, and the team, and acted as a main communications tool to set expectations with stakeholders regarding what would be done when without the need for lengthy analysis and design.

Assessing agility to improve capability

Each month, ZXM assessed the team’s agile capability maturity each month using our Agile IQ tools and framework. This helped us to consider the agile techniques as well as behavioural and cultural change goals that were needed to deliver the project in an agile way and engage with the Scrum Master and Product Owner to help them embed a stronger agile capability to deliver the outcome faster.