Business in a new light

Australian Red Cross engaged Elabor8 to help us understand how to work more effectively as we deliver on future humanitarian outcomes. Their valuable insights helped us see where our existing internal structures and processes both helped and hindered our people and were the catalyst for a valuable discussion with the Red Cross Leadership team. As a result, the Leadership team decided to focus on two projects through which we could test out new agile ways of working. Elabor8 coached the teams and were able to identify and mitigate any obstacles to achieving their goals. Our engagement with Elabor8 has helped us see where we can improve and how to better harness our strengths. At 104 years young, we have a wealth of knowledge, passion and expertise, but with Elabor8’s help we have been able to start a conversation about embedding continuous improvement practices across our great organisation.

“We engaged Elabor8 to coach and guide our four technology teams in the use of Agile. All four teams had little to no Agile experience. With Elabor8’s coaching, within the space of three months, all four teams were operating Agile. This included both Scrum and Kanban philosophies as well as following all the principle ceremonies.

Our uplift was so successful that we became the leading team in our wider technology group of which other groups were visiting to see how we were operating. Elabor8 also coached our leadership team in the values of having a vision and purpose and built on our soft skills which has improved the overall engagement amongst our team. I will be using Elabor8 again and recommending them to my colleagues.”

“Elabor8 were here from the very beginning helping us design the (operating) model,” Andrew said. “It’s important to have both sides of the coin pushing and pulling – how we do things here versus how we should be doing them – to make sure we landed in the right place.”

“Working with Elabor8 was fantastic. The breadth of skills they brought to the engagement including meeting leadership to create organisational alignment, technical architecture and system development allowed us to achieve our goals in record time. It has helped us deliver value faster and more effectively than we would otherwise have been able to.”

“David points out, “What worked so well was we weren’t just taking a process off a shelf and forcing an organisation into using it. We utilised something that’s a bit like the Scrum of Scrums from SAFe®, something else that’s like a Kanban board, and so on. But it was all very specific to how they work and how they needed to work.”

Our engagement with Elabor8 has delivered great results. Megaport is going through a period of rapid growth, and our engineering department has tripled in size in the last 12 months. Our challenge was to effectively scale the teams while meeting tight delivery times and continuing to ensure high-quality code in production.

Working collaboratively with a core team from Elabor8, we embedded a more predictable, transparent and scalable way of working that allows us to accelerate the delivery of value to our customers and partners. While this is a long term journey, we saw immediate results. After just three months we saw significant improvements in the alignment of teams to our business strategy, collaboration across business units, staff engagement, predictability of our deliveries and the overall positivity of our people. And perhaps most importantly, Elabor8 worked collaboratively with the teams to jointly achieve these results.