18 Months on: Agile Working at Zipform Digital

18 months ago, Zipform Digital ushered in a new, more agile way of working – ultimately creating an adaptive and collaborative workplace and inspiring value-driven partnerships with their clients. We spoke with CEO Richard Vaughan and Delivery Model Owner Alexis Williams to discover more.

The agile approach to everyday business at Zipform Digital took just over six months of development and implementation, with the assistance of boutique consultancy Scalabl, who helped build internal capabilities – officially going live in February 2023.

CEO Zipform Digital Richard Vaughan, and Delivery Model Owner Alexis Williams, both agreed that the main challenge of moving beyond the excitement of launch into everyday operations was keeping teams in different departments on track.

Richard was frank in his observations of the challenges faced,

“Ensuring we kept to the new ways of working and not reverting to previous, perhaps more comfortable methods has offered challenges. Implementing company-wide change is never easy, but keeping to the overarching truth of why we made this change and the outcome we aspired to, ultimately kept the teams on track.”

Alexis agreed, emphasizing that finding balance was critical,

“Ensuring the changes we put in place were purposeful for most teams within Zipform Digital and supporting the development teams in their work plus keeping up client communication was a delicate balance at the beginning. Ensuring visibility and transparency throughout the implementation and beyond has led to much better outcomes 18 months down the track.”

Fostering everyday innovation

Developing everyday innovation within the business has been an outcome of the new ways of working, which CEO Richard Vaughan said is a direct result of the focus on developing a leadership mindset in teams.

“It’s clear that fostering that leadership mindset has inspired people who were going about their day-to-day work to stand up and make a positive influence in the business. We’ve had multiple rising stars appear which has been amazing. By empowering others to make decisions, growth and continuous improvement have resulted.”

Alexis said that providing outlets and recognition for innovation has been important for maintaining communication.

“Via our “90-day Showcase”, our teams now have an opportunity to celebrate success whilst appreciating the achievements of each team. We also make sure that it’s never set and forget, we highlight lessons learnt and have regular ‘retrospectives’ to ensure continual improvement and ongoing refinement.”

An innovation mindset

Feedback from clients has been positive, with most appreciating the greater level of visibility and deliverables. Richard said being able to align 90-day planning cycles with clients offered benefits for all,

“Aligning the planning cycle with our clients own has been a real positive. The agile model itself promotes continuous improvement, and whilst we effectively implemented a new business model, it’s continually refined to address pain points and feedback. It will change consistently as our customers, strategy, external and internal factors influence our business.”

All staff now have visibility into planning and the rationale behind a project’s progression, with the model also providing for capacity planning and more effective business risk management. Richard says the next element of improvements to the business model lies in innovation.

“We never sit still when it comes to improving our business or our service to clients. Innovation has been the buzz word of choice for a long time, so we have taken a step back to consider what it means to be innovative. Our people have co-designed an innovation mindset training series, to focus on how we innovative as a business, and what that means for our clients. Over the past 40 years the business has never sat still and has always evolved, and hopefully we always will.”