In August 2017, just a year after the 2016 census debacle, which left the Australian Bureau of Statistics bruised and humbled, the agency was tasked with running a postal survey on marriage equality in just 100 days.
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There was doubt about whether the agency could pull it off, but today the agency's agile capability lead, Juliet Fallace, will reveal how some trendy management tricks helped the postal survey get off the ground.
Ms Fallace said "agile" is a working style used mainly by software development companies, but the ABS used it for the taskforce of about 100 staff to create and run the postal survey. The census headache was still fresh in the corporate memory when the agency first found out about its new major public task.
"The marriage survey was directed to us pretty much a year on from the census," Ms Fallace said.
One of the major issues picked up in the MacGibbon review of what went wrong with the census was the agency's ability to make rapid decisions and mitigate issues early on. Agile techniques were already being adopted in other parts of the agency, leading to the decision to use them in the survey.
"For that very reason the executive team thought 'Well 99 days is tight, we're not going to be able to project-manage this and keep abreast of all the issues and risks that come with running this across the country' and with that they made the decision to adopt agile," Ms Fallace said.
The management style involves "stand up" meetings, which the ABS held twice a day in the lead up to the survey, and removing hierarchies so ideas from more junior staff members could be heard.
Ms Fallace will tell the AgileAus conference in Melbourne on Monday that the working style would allow government agencies to respond to tightening budgets.
"There is a reality here now that government is reducing funding across agencies, but we're still expected to do the same with less. On top of that we're also pressured on the public expectations on what services and products that we are to provide to our end user – that is the average public Joe out there," Ms Fallace said.
"Technology is rapidly changing, it's really hard to keep up to date, it's not sustainable to keep working the way we're working, in a waterfall way or a project management kind of way. Agile has proven that by delivering value and challenging yourself about what your value position is and what priority work you are to work on, you can still achieve delivering more with less and meeting those demands."
The techniques used in the marriage survey are spreading across the agency, but Ms Fallace said it wasn't as simple as an immediate wholesale rollout of the new working style.
"Where we fail as government agencies is we get the next shiny thing and we say let's adopt it and we don't really think through the strategy or the implications on staff. It's a change process and it takes time and it's a cultural shift. So anything new you introduce you've got to recognise that you've got to change-manage it."
