Driving digital transformation in local government

The situation

In the past 18 months, a leader in the local government sector, prior to engaging Cprime Elabor8, made a significant investment to transform their digital customer experience with a team created and dedicated to this goal. The team then developed a digital customer experience strategy and roadmap, which informed delivery.

In parallel, the council decided to insource website development to improve delivery speed and enhance the quality of its digital services. The team’s work was guided not only by the digital roadmap but also by the growing demand for improved digital services from other sources within the council. To ensure effective project execution, the team adopted a Scrum-inspired process, which is a key aspect of Agile methodologies in government. This approach allowed for greater flexibility and responsiveness to changes, ultimately contributing to the successful implementation of the digital transformation initiative.

The challenge

To better position the Council to execute this new customer experience strategy and roadmap, a few hurdles had to be addressed.

First, the newly formed team responsible for the digital strategy, was reporting into two separate parts of the organisation. This fragmented reporting line made it difficult to align the team’s work with the overarching digital transformation strategy and to keep key business stakeholders informed and engaged.

Another challenge was the introduction of various new capabilities across the organisation. Without a unified approach, these capabilities lacked coherence, which threatened to slow down the overall delivery speed and diminish the effectiveness of the digital transformation. The absence of a consistent methodology and the risk of misalignment highlighted the need for a more structured and cohesive way of working.

To accommodate the new capabilities, the Council needed to introduce new team structures. These new structures would need support and coaching to embed the new ways of working as well as streamline agile delivery methods and tools.

With this in mind, the Council engaged Cprime Elabor8 to undertake a review and make recommendations with respect to processes, roles, practices and team structure. The implementation phase involved hands-on mentoring and coaching to ensure that the recommended changes were fully integrated into their processes and that the teams were equipped to sustain the improvements.

The Process

Cprime Elabor8 undertook a 2-week discovery across processes, roles, practices and team structures. This included:

• Conducting twelve in-depth interviews with leaders, team members, and key stakeholders to understand the current digital strategy alignment and challenges.
• Observing key meetings and Agile events to assess the effectiveness of the Scrum-inspired process and overall Agile methodologies in use.
• Performing a team agility assessment to gauge the team’s readiness and capability to support the ongoing digital transformation.
• Analysing data from various documents, including the Digital Strategy and Roadmap and current Jira projects, to identify gaps and areas for improvement.

After the Discovery, the findings and recommendations were presented back to the client. Collaboratively, we prioritised actions and developed a tailored implementation plan designed to overcome the identified obstacles and enhance the Council’s digital transformation strategy.

The solution

Using the findings from the discovery as a baseline, Cprime Elabor8 consultants supported the council by:

• Conducting a STATIK workshop: To provide clarity of processes, activities as well as roles and responsibilities. It also supported the Jira uplift and facilitated an overall cleanup and prioritisation of the backlog, ensuring alignment with the digital customer experience strategy.
• Role uplift through coaching: To address capability gaps identified during the discovery phase, such as those in testing, Cprime Elabor8 provided tailored coaching to uplift roles and ensure all team members were fully equipped to contribute effectively.
• Uplifting the prioritisation process: Cprime Elabor8 refined the prioritisation process, clearly distinguishing between product decisions and delivery decisions, to streamline workflow and improve delivery speed.
• Clarifying roles and responsibilities: Cprime Elabor8 worked to ensure that all team members and stakeholders had a clear understanding of their roles within the new team structure, fostering better collaboration and alignment with the digital transformation strategy.
• Establishing baseline delivery metrics: To support ongoing process and delivery improvements, Cprime Elabor8 created baseline delivery metrics and implemented a system to capture these metrics regularly. This provided the Council with the tools needed to monitor progress and make data-driven decisions moving forward.

The results

Following Cprime Elabor8’s recommendations and execution of the post-discovery implementation plan, the client observed:

• Enhanced visibility and alignment: Increased visibility of work from inception to delivery, providing the team and leaders with clarity on where work was at, possible bottlenecks and the ability to easily align work with the overarching digital customer experience strategy.
• Adoption of metrics for capacity planning: By adopting robust metrics to understand team capacity and plan work, the Council enabled its teams to set more realistic delivery expectations.
• Reduction in cycle time: A significant reduction in cycle time for testing was achieved, with the process being shortened from weeks to less than a day. This accelerated the overall delivery speed, ensuring that digital initiatives were brought to fruition more quickly and effectively, which is critical in the fast-paced environment of digital transformation.
• Streamlined reporting: The implementation of automated reporting tools minimised the manual effort required from both teams and leaders. This reduction in manual reporting not only saved time but also improved the accuracy and timeliness of data, further supporting the Council’s strategic decision-making.
• Prioritised test automation: By prioritising the adoption of test automation, the Council increased its confidence in delivery and reduced the manual effort involved in testing. This focus on automation not only enhanced the quality of deliverables but also contributed to faster, more reliable outcomes, reinforcing the success of the digital transformation.

Final Thoughts

When we started, we could see that there was a lot of knowledge and skill in the team. Cprime Elabor8 was able to help the team contextualise what they had learnt elsewhere to better meet the needs of their current situation.

A key element of success for this engagement was building transparency, which enabled the right conversations at the right time with the right people. Getting that right enabled everything else to fall into place.

Ready to elevate your organisation’s alignment to value and achieve impactful results? Our Transformation solutions can support your organisation’s journey.

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