Agile Methodology: How Australia Post Gets Rapid Results

On the back wall of Cameron Gough’s workspace at Australia Post’s Bourke Street headquarters in Melbourne, is a “Success Wall” – a montage of 80 coloured cue cards. Scrawled on each card is a task aimed at improving customer experience. More than an attractive multicoloured backdrop, these cards are a powerful symbol of the transformation in Australia Post’s digital methodology. And the wow factor? They’re all finished.

Gough, whose title is General Manager of Australia Post’s Digital Delivery Centre, talks enthusiastically about small, collaborative teams, face-to-face conversations, continual customer feedback, flexibility and the rapid results.

Here are some examples from the “Success Wall”. Leave it in a safe place, launched in mid-November, alerts MyPost customers to pending deliveries and provides delivery options to leave their parcel in a safe place if they aren’t at home.

Other cue cards record the successful launch of print-as-you-go labels for parcels, digital in-store customer receipts and digital police checks. A pink cue card from April marks the launch of Australia Post’s Apple Watch app, which took just six weeks to develop at a cost of about $50,000.

“Using a traditional project-based approach that project could have taken 6 months” Gough says. The traditional, or “waterfall”, approach, he explains, is a stepped, sequential process with a defined outcome, requiring an initial business case, scoping out of requirements, architecture, design, testing and more. ”This approach isn’t a good fit for the digital space, where we