Elabor8 : Strengthening Organizational Assets to Foster Agility

NBN Co, a large wholesale telecommunications provider, is often burdened with challenging client targets that stresses on tight deadline with tasks needing to be done readily and also, cost-effectively. To ensure that the company delivers on time, the organization decided to embrace the agile ways of working using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). However, having always operated in a waterfall model, moving to agile was no easy task. While navigating through the agile adoption pathway, the company eliminates several hiccups, the first being having to design, build, and rollout one of the largest fiber networks in the world under significant public scrutiny. This required NBN to oblige under a fixed government financing agreement that gradually downsized the teams in its transition to a leaner operating model. Given the intensifying complexity of the situation, NBN joined hands with a management consultancy firm, Elabor8, to act as the coach that could upskill the SAFe team and help to foster a mindset different from the traditional approach.

To address this, Elabor8 designed a change program to uplift the mindset, behavior, and ultimately the culture of the team so that they could embrace agility. The theme was ‘developing a high performing team culture’. Elabor8 conducted workshops and interviews to understand baseline team perspectives and attributes and identified several areas to focus upon, such as increasing awareness of and creating psychological safety and trust amongst all of the team members.

The company carefully programmed the workshops by leveraging expertise in psychology, psychotherapy, mindfulness, leadership, and team development and incorporated a tonality that encompasses a blend of both traditional and experiential learning approaches.

This is but one of the many success stories that Elabor8 has scripted over the last few years. The company works from within to unlock the promise of agility by instilling the mindsets and systems that are crucial to innovation. Elabor8 believes that to compete in a digital-first world, companies need to realize the potential of their human assets and liberate them so that they can be free to adapt and move. It strives hard towards making this possible through advisory, coaching, and training that allow organizations to create the muscle memory that lets team leaders rapidly respond to customer demand.

In essence, Elabor8 works collaboratively with its clients to inculcate the values of agility and culture shift among the workforce. To that end, it works end-to-end to provide not only strategic direction but also support them from within, at every rudimentary level, to embed the ideas and, in return, gain traction. The company’s training, practitioner coaching, and consulting services help organizations build the digital capability needed to get value into the hands of customers faster.

At heart, the Elabor8 team is committed to building high-performing technology ecosystems and developing leading-edge capabilities. Not only does this drive business innovation, alongside supporting operational efficiency but also improves clients’ software lifecycle and sharpens their team’s engineering practices. Precisely, the company’s coaches infuse the mantra of modern principles, practices, and tools among individuals that empower them to create and operate well-crafted software that is scalable, maintainable, and meets the current data silos and marketing demands. In short, Elabor8 leaves no stone unturned into helping clients adopt the agile way of working. With innovation at its core, it would be interesting to witness how the Victoria-based firm creates ripples in the waters of agile transformation.