The Australian Red Cross is a leading humanitarian aid and community services charity, providing worldwide support in times of crisis. It also advocates for upholding international humanitarian law, migration support, and community services for disadvantaged or vulnerable communities.
The world is changing rapidly, and so are the challenges that the Australian Red Cross faces. Unexpected disasters, a changing climate and new conflicts and legalities create the need to be able to respond to change quickly.
Managing the details of 180 services across every state in Australia, and across 30 different systems has proved an ongoing challenge. There was a huge opportunity to improve efficiency by addressing how the organization might get a clear picture of who it is helping and via how many services. This visibility and the ability to capture and maintain data once, in a single system, would improve levels of accountability, as well as make it easier to meet regulatory and funding requirements.
With a client case management product identified, the team considered how a diverse change management system, affecting the entire organization, could be broken down to deliver key functionality, build capability and advocacy early, as well as responding to ongoing change.
Thoughtworks partnered with Red Cross to introduce an Agile way of working into the organization.
Together, we ran a discovery to identify themes for improvement, before creating a visual system to plan out the entire portfolio of work across all services. We developed a lean roadmap to establish a standardized, yet highly flexible approach to onboarding individual services, introducing Agile tools and techniques to each team as they were engaged.
An Agile approach has allowed us to deliver value to Red Cross employees and clients faster, as well as use visual systems to create deeper engagement with our business stakeholders
An Agile approach to change management allowed Red Cross to rapidly unlock the value of work undertaken to select and customize a product, building alignment in the team and fostering advocacy with service stakeholders, technology stakeholders, and senior leadership.
Today the client case management product is used by over a third of Red Cross services and the organization continues to add to this number to achieve their vision of a centralized data management system.
