Rapid response team for executives

How ZXM helped executives in a large government department responded rapidly to COVID-19 with agile.

The Situation

ZXM was engaged by the Department of Innovation and Industry to help them develop their agile capabilities at scale within the CIO’s division. When COVID pandemic struck, the CIO asked one of the ZXM coaching team to assist with its internal response to the COVID-19 pandemic by being embedded into the internal taskforce managing the crisis. The taskforce had been charged with developing new policy, frameworks and procedures with input from multiple groups across the enterprise and to communicate the new artifacts out to the broader organisation.

ZXM was asked to be the Scrum Master for the executive taskforce – formed as an Executive Action Team (E.A.T.) – to help support gathering detail quickly, to make the process transparent, as well as have the ability to rapidly respond and pivot to new priorities in the ever changing environment.

The Solution

ZXM worked with the EAT taskforce which consisted of senior staff from various divisions (IT, People, Property and Communications) to underpin quality and well structured artifacts prior to external feedback. A new virtual board was created to assist with identifying what were the most valuable items for the taskforce to work towards and provide transparency to the broader division as to their progress.

Part of the COVID response was for all staff to work from home and as the taskforce began to transition to remote ways of working, ZXM set up a Daily Scrum event to ensure the team was setting the plan for the next 24 hours. Given the rapid flow of information and need to respond quickly to change, two other daily check in meetings were put in place. This helped ensure that the new details from within the taskforce and feedback from the broader division continued to flow through quickly and momentum was not lost or wasted.

ZXM worked with the executive of the taskforce to identify the most valuable items for the task force to be completing, leading to a daily plan with achievable outcomes. This resulted in outcomes such as practical action cards and checklists that were developed for managers being rolled out quickly to assist with their interaction with staff members.

The Results

With ZXM’s help the taskforce was able to rapidly respond to the COVID pandemic and set up new policy and frameworks within its first week and continue to respond to evolving policy needs over the next few weeks. This involved consultation with a large number of stakeholders from all groups within the division. The taskforce successfully ensured transparency of decisions and awareness of new policy changes were promptly communicated across multiple digital channels.

This was the first time the department’s agile framework was taken outside of the CIO group and exposed more staff members from across the department to how they can improve the Departments enterprise agility.

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