How a state government transformed Portfolio Management and delivery with a Single View of Work

The situation

In mid-2021, a very large NSW government agency began their transformation of widespread adoption of scaled Agile practices in line with their strategic objectives.

They faced challenges in planning across teams and programs:

• Lack of alignment: Leadership was uncertain whether team efforts aligned with long-term strategic goals, and it was difficult to assess the impact of priority changes
• Inability to adapt: Teams struggled to respond quickly to changing customer needs and priorities due to resource reallocation within teams and programs
• Fragmented work tracking: Work was tracked inconsistently across various tools, including MS Planner and Jira, which was not being used to its full potential
• Reporting difficulties: Teams and leadership lacked the ability to track, report, and create effective dashboards
• Output-focused: Teams had too great of a focus on outputs, rather than customer outcomes and goals

The primary goals were to:

• Align agency initiatives with strategic goals
• Create a cohesive delivery culture across their entire portfolio of work to maximise the value brought to the community

Cprime Elabor8 was engaged to uplift Portfolio Management capabilities from planning to delivery and reporting, leveraging our expertise in Agile transformations and Atlassian suite implementation to establish a Single View of Work. 

The challenge

The main challenge was the lack of visibility into the portfolio. It was difficult to determine who was working on what and how it was progressing against strategic objectives. This resulted in excessive time spent by PMO employees, Project Managers and other roles on generating monthly, quarterly and yearly reports.

Initially, the NSW state government agency considered the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) but, after the first pilot of Agile Release Train (ART), a customised framework was developed to better suit the agency’s context and needs. Leadership was very data-driven and wanted to see the scaled framework work in action, so it was down to a couple of first movers. What Leadership did want, however, was to optimise people’s time and the public’s money.

Another challenge was the shift from a fully remote work environment to a hybrid model, requiring adaptations in planning and collaboration.

The process

Cprime Elabor8 collaborated closely with the senior leadership team, evolving the approach from an off-the-shelf SAFe ART model to a customised, sustainable change model. The client had their own Centre of Excellence, acting like an internal transformation consultancy for the wider agency, learning and adapting as they went and generating revenue for their own area.

Cprime Elabor8 led the setup of the internal consultancy transformation team, as well as the rollout of new practices and implementation of tools to support both the remote working and Single View of Work setup. A critical success factor was the close collaboration between our tooling and coaching team members, working hand-in-hand with a Change Manager, Leadership, and the Portfolio Management Office to lead the change.

Let’s delve further into the Process:

Discovery and analysis

• Undertaking a discovery activity uncovered the specific requirements, existing tooling usage, licensing and support details, skills needed and goals for establishing the Centre of Excellence
• Co-designing the most suitable delivery operating model tailored to their unique context, encompassing governance, tooling, delivery, and culture
• Conducting engaging Senior Leadership workshops to collaboratively design their portfolio structure and identify the key changes needed for easier work management
• Established the Centre of Excellence by launching initial teams, creating backlogs and planning out the first quarter’s initiatives
• Designing clear streams of activity to follow, specifically: Internal Training & Facilitation, Capability Uplift & Coaching, Tooling, and Single View of Work implementation

Internal training and facilitation

• Creating a clear communication and change management plan for the rollout of Portfolios
• Developing a range of training modules tailored to their context to support people transitioning to the new delivery practices
• Developing and delivering tool training to teams and specific roles on Mural for online whiteboarding, Jira for teams and Jira Align for team of teams and Portfolio level
• Facilitating leadership, team-of-teams kickoff events and quarterly planning events, ensuring leadership and teams were aligned and prepared for the transition

Capability uplift and coaching

• Conducting team of team and team-based launches for formation and change management, ensuring a clear start and sustainable change adapted to their unique situation
• Providing ongoing coaching to enhance collaboration, facilitation or co-facilitation of events, providing feedback to teams and individual roles to ensure growth, tooling advice and changes to ensure that they were embedded and solving the right problems, providing clarity of roles and accountability and ensuring a culture of continuous improvement was being fostered
• Facilitating and contributing to Communities of Practice events by creating and leading events, and providing an uplift plan with role-based, agility-based, and leadership-program content
• Setting regular cadences for the leadership team to convene and coaching the team to collaboratively decide on current priorities for teams and the next quarter. The implemented tooling enabled this process to happen with ease and with limited preparation compared to before

Tooling and Single View of Work

• Designing and implementing new structures and configurations, and continually adapting the Atlassian suite, including Jira, Confluence, and Jira Align. This enabled Cprime Elabor8 to provide a robust tooling foundation for leaders, portfolios, and teams to have effective dashboarding and reporting, facilitating the Single View of Work
• Developing a clear hierarchy of work within the tooling structure, allowing for standardised reporting and dashboards
• Establishing a Single View of Work within Jira Align, enabling transparency and real-time tracking of progress, risks, and dependencies and ensuring that these were linked to the various strategic goals
• Configuring the tools to fully support the scaled operating model, ensuring seamless integration, reporting and roadmapping capabilities. Providing a single, unified view across multiple areas was essential
• Introduced Mural as the preferred whiteboard tool to support events and remote working collaboration

The solution

Cprime Elabor8 established a Single View of Work by enhancing Jira, implementing and configuring Jira Align, using Confluence as a knowledge repository and Mural for online whiteboarding. This was complemented by changes to ways of working, including establishing cadences, implementing a hierarchy of work, and slicing work down.

Key solutions included:

Establishing cadences

Ensuring teams worked on a consistent cadence was crucial. This involved ensuring that the teams were working on the same, consistent cadence by aligning start and end dates for sprints and Quarters. A consistent cadence created a greater alignment of plans via common dates and timeframes, making collaboration easier and simplifying dependency management. Teams were all working towards the same planning dates and timeframes for both sprints and Quarterly Planning.

These cadence dates are essential for Jira Align to effectively manage the portfolio. They enable accurate planning, create clear progress bars, generate roadmaps, and much more, providing a unified view of progress and timelines.

Implementing a hierarchy of work

A clear, four-layer hierarchy of work was established, spanning from the team level to the top portfolio level within Jira and Jira Align. This created a common foundation and language that both teams and leadership could understand and relate to.

This hierarchy provided a standardised yet flexible way to break down work into smaller, manageable chunks for execution. By defining clear levels of work, everyone had a shared understanding of how their tasks contributed to the larger strategic goals.

Slicing work

Work was sliced into similar-sized portions, such as User Stories, Features, and Epics. This enabled different teams to discuss work in the same way and estimate it similarly. It also facilitated the creation of roadmaps, whether for a product, theme, platform, or specific piece of work, that were easily communicated and understood by everyone.

Jira Align Roadmaps enabled viewing all work related to a specific product in one roadmap, as well as roadmaps for future quarter plans. These were live roadmaps using real-time data from both Jira and Jira Align, ensuring everyone had access to the most current information.

Creating reporting and dashboards

The solutions above enabled the creation of standard reporting and dashboards in Jira Align, and custom dashboards in Jira and Confluence, covering portfolio, team of teams, and team levels.

It was critical that the tooling supported this setup, allowing team members to drill up to the highest piece of work and leadership to drill down to the lowest. This transparency and visibility, achieved through the use of roadmaps, dashboards, visual boards, reports, dependency maps, and risk registers, aided in effective events and decision-making.

The Results

Over the course of 2+ years, the transformation rolled out to 32 teams across 14 team of teams, leading to significant improvements in transparency and alignment with strategic goals. The client experienced:

• Increased predictability and consistency with delivery: Metrics for capacity planning were used for both teams and teams of teams, enabling more realistic plans to be built and achieved. This avoided overloading teams and increased employee satisfaction
• Swift risk and issue management: Leadership teams were able to act swiftly to manage any risk and issues as soon as they arose, with a Single View of Work in real-time and a practice of raising impediments as soon as teams became aware of them
• Standardised ways of working: A standardised way of working within a team of teams structure that enabled alignment and autonomy, rather than manually aligning plans, teams, and individuals and reporting on progress per project. This equated to time saved pulling reporting together for PMO, Project Managers and teams
• Strategic visibility in Jira Align: Leadership saw their Single View of Work linked to strategy for the first time within the Jira Align Strategy Room (also known as the Strategy Pyramid). Epics/Features/Objectives were linked to the organisation’s long-term strategies, enabling leaders to see their progress. It revealed a lot of work happening and a lot of work to do; this influenced prioritisation and enabled tradeoffs to occur, easier than ever before. Time was also saved because they could drill down into a specific Strategy/Epic/Feature/Objective if they wanted to, whereas previously it would be a request for a meeting or a report
• Scalability with the Centre of Excellence: The Centre of Excellence setup meant that the client could easily scale up once new areas were onboarded. Together, we achieved 1 single ecosystem that easily integrated natively into one another thanks to the Atlassian products

Final thoughts

Cprime Elabor8 recently reviewed 18 months of data from a particular team of teams, consisting of approximately 120 people. The review revealed a significant improvement: they are now four times faster at delivering value to customers. Additionally, their predictability and confidence in committing to plans and delivery have tripled. This translates to a remarkable shift, where a large piece of work that previously took 5.4 quarters to complete now takes just 1.35 quarters.

The engagement extended beyond enhancing delivery capabilities; it fostered a culture of transparency and collaboration across the organization. Leaders gained an unprecedented ability to pivot effectively, as they could now see the Single View of Work directly linked to the organisation’s long-term strategies. This linkage provided a clear understanding of how each initiative contributed to the overall goals, enabling better decision-making and resource allocation.

Cprime Elabor8’s dual expertise in leveraging the Atlassian suite of tools and implementing pragmatic Agile Transformation enabled the client to establish a sustainable Centre of Excellence, initiate change, refine and adapt the rollout, and maintain momentum to this day. The ability to blend tooling solutions with agile methodologies ensured a holistic and lasting transformation.

Are you ready to lead with confidence? Talk to us to learn how our Single View of Work Solution can seamlessly align strategy with outcomes using real-time data.

Agile Governance Single View of Work Toolchain Transformation Ways of Working