GovCMS — co-designing a roadmap across multidisciplinary teams

Driving a more mature and efficient whole-of-government platform

Salsa coordinated efforts across three different GovCMS departments and our platform partners amazee.io, leading cross-functional team workshops to reflect on past experiences, prioritise activities for each team, inform budget planning and develop a GovCMS roadmap.

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At a glance

<$50K
2022
6 to 8 weeks
Completed
GovCMS, Drupal, LAGOON
Federal government
Discovery & strategy, Support & optimisation, Technical advisory
GovTech, Whole of government, Open source, Web development, Open platform, Content management systems
User needs, Multidisciplinary teams, Agile delivery, Tools & systems, Security, Open standards & common platforms, Open source, Testing, Measure performance

Overview

GovCMS’ challenge

As a large, complex, fast-growing whole-of-government digital program, GovCMS needed a way to conduct program-wide retrospective and planning sessions that included stakeholders from all teams.

GovCMS’ transformation

Salsa created a new, remote workshopping and planning process based on agile retrospectives. We started with a high level program roadmap session before moving onto sessions with the GovCMS program streams. Participants identified challenges and opportunities and issues were then ranked to give us a backlog for each stream.

The outcomes

  • A prioritised backlog of actionable tickets representative of the five distinct teams
  • A roadmap for the GovCMS program for the upcoming 12 months
  • Budget inputs informed by grass-roots program stakeholder needs

Full case study

GovCMS’ challenge — improving and scaling a large digital program with a multidisciplinary team

As a large, complex, fast-growing whole-of-government digital program, GovCMS needed a way to conduct program-wide retrospective and planning sessions that included stakeholders from all of the cross-functional stakeholder teams. This process was an essential element in maintaining and scaling a whole-of-government digital platform and program like GovCMS.

The stakeholders were located all over Australia and overseas so the session would need to be conducted remotely. At the conclusion of the session schedule, outputs would need to be collated to produce a prioritised list of actionable tasks for operational and budget planning purposes.

GovCMS’ transformation — remote, retro-styled sessions

Salsa created a new, remote workshopping and planning process based on agile retrospectives. The sessions included representation across 5 teams —Department of Finance heads (GovCMS, ServiceOps and Comms), key members of the Salsa team and key staff from amazee.io.

The goal of the first workshop was to reflect on the experiences from the past 12 months, discuss the GovCMS product roadmap, and then agree on the top 3 challenges and top 3 opportunities for six program areas:

  1. Platform/infrastructure
  2. DevOps
  3. Service Desk
  4. Security (including SecOps)
  5. Program governance
  6. Community engagement and training

We started the process off by asking the question: If you could change one thing, what would it be? We used MS Teams’ Planner board for the session, and ended up with a rough roadmap that included all the items raised sorted by stream.

Salsa then ran followup workshops across each stream, using the items raised in the original session. We asked people to vote on other people’s ideas and the action points with the most votes were moved to the top of the board.

Once this part of the process was done, we then discussed each item in more detail. We considered the requirements, any challenges, skill levels required to implement, etc. We weren’t trying to solve the issue or fully scope it at this stage, just understand it.

Screenshot of the Planner board for the DevOps stream workshop

Once the followup workshops were complete across all streams, Salsa started consolidating the lists, looking for any crossovers. At this stage we were able to identify common themes, such as the DevOps backlog, Lagoon native bulk deployments, secure forms implementation, pre-release testing, and Solr issues.

With the lists consolidated, Salsa pulled out the top three priorities for each stream. Each item was assigned an owner for the list of tasks and next steps identified. Goals were set for 30-day deliverables and longer-term enhancements were also identified.

Next steps

GovCMS liked the workshopping process and wants to follow this new process on a more regular basis. The GovCMS team is also currently using the outcomes to build a public-facing roadmap for all GovCMS clients and potential clients to see.

The outcomes — prioritised backlog and roadmap

  • A strong, repeatable process for coordinating feedback that helps the GovCMS program to continue to succeed and to grow

  • Clear program priorities gathered from multiple stakeholders, across multiple companies and multidisciplinary teams

  • A prioritised backlog of actionable tickets and enhancement projects that were truly representative of the five distinct teams involved

  • A roadmap for the GovCMS program for the upcoming 12 months

  • Budget inputs that were informed by grass-roots program stakeholder needs

About GovCMS

The Department of FinanceExternal Link (Finance) owns the GovCMS platform, a whole-of-government digital platform for use across all levels of government in Australia. GovCMS is built on Drupal, an award-winning, enterprise-grade CMS that’s easy to use, stable, highly secure and open source (no license fees).