A group of women in workwear smiling and making celebratory gestures at a work site.
Source: Pacific Labour Facility
  • Agility
  • Delivery
  • Design

Pacific Labour Facility transforms for greater agility

The Australian federal government's Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme allows eligible Australian businesses to hire workers from 9 Pacific island nations and Timor-Leste when there are not enough local workers available. The key objective of the program is net economic benefit for all parties. The program is managed by Palladium Group under their Pacific Labour Facility (PLF) business unit.

Cadent was engaged by PLF to lead a multi-vendor team to deliver business-critical, public-facing web products based on the Microsoft Power Platform, along with a significant migration and consolidation of features and data from legacy programs. During this engagement, dramatic increases in demand, rapid growth of the program, and significant changes in the program's external environment gave rise to a need for urgent improvements to the organisation's agility.

Concurrently to delivering on the original product management brief, Cadent worked with key stakeholders to implement and adopt an agile operating model based on Scrum and Scrum@Scale. This model established a fortnightly delivery cadence across all critical business systems that the entire organisation could converge around. This had the effect of improving clarity of organisational priorities from leadership to front-line employees, and facilitated PLF to rapidly redirect its resources in response to its environment in ways that maximised value delivery while also achieving quality objectives. Initiatives that would usually take several months to go from conception to delivery are now deliverable by the same personnel within weeks.

Significantly, inspection and adaptation mechanisms that feature in the agile operating model facilitated further organisational improvements. These included the establishment of an organisation-wide governance approach that mapped to the model, and highlighted the need for subsequent service mapping, user experience and user interface design initiatives, for which Cadent has been engaged.