Australia Post Partners With Odecee, a Cognizant Digital Business, to Conduct Design Sprints

“This is the story of how Australia Post’s Small Business team got innovating fast,” writes Benson Tait, Design Thinker and Innovation Manager at Australia Post, in an interesting account of design sprints organized in collaboration with Odecee, a Cognizant Digital Business. Excerpts:

“Our value proposition is simple — help Australian small businesses become the business they want to be — but our technical platform is new, Australia Post is a large-scale enterprise, and our customers move fast! So we have to innovate and deliver quickly.

We have a ‘big, hairy, audacious’ campaign ahead of us and the way we currently validate and deliver our ideas wasn’t going to be fast enough to meet our deadline. Something had to change. So with consideration of our current delivery model, team, culture and stakeholders we decided to try Design Sprints. Not just one Sprint but four Sprints…in just five weeks!

A Design Sprint is a great way to innovate and it gets you moving in 5 days!

We were really interested to see if this approach would be one that works with a SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework for Enterprise) delivery model. And if it did work, would it enable us to deliver value faster to our customers?

The primary scope for the program’s next release had already been set. While this could be seen as a constraint in one way, in another way it really helped us focus on how we should spend our precious sprint time. Across the program we worked quickly with the strategy and program teams to understand the riskiest and most ‘unknown’ major features. We couldn’t afford to waste valuable Sprint time on the easy stuff.

We wanted to get going very quickly, so we partnered with Odecee, a Cognizant Digital Business, to provide two Sprint Masters, additional designers and prototypers. This allowed us to plan and execute the Sprints quickly and hit the ground running in just 2 weeks.

Given the success of our Design Sprints to date, they are now being adopted to supported our existing SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework for Enterprise) process, accelerating and championing our customers’ voices.”

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