How Australia Post Maximizes Business Value With Shibumi

Shibumi's strategic portfolio management provides 100% visibility into 400+ initiatives, spanning large-scale cost transformation, innovation, and real estate investments

Company Name:
Australia Post
Industry:
Post Service
Location:
Melbourne, Australia
Company Size:
A$8.97 billion in annual revenue
Use Cases:
  • Enterprise-Wide Visibility
  • Progress Tracking
  • Process Improvement
  • Single Source of Truth
Business Impact:
  • 100% visibility of transformations
  • Weeks of time saved on reporting

Customer Overview

Australia Post is a large, government-owned corporation providing postal services to more than 10 million unique addresses.

Goal

Automated, Real-Time Visibility Into an Extensive and Diverse $1.5bn Portfolio

Australia Post (AusPost) is a large government business enterprise providing postal services throughout Australia, is a key enabler of the economy and a touchstone for communities, particularly in rural and remote areas, reaching more than 10 million addresses. AusPost has a large volume of initiatives and data to manage and track across agency services, parcels and logistics, and mail delivery. With a rise in competition and limited resources to invest, AusPost struggled to understand the ROI of various initiatives, to rank and prioritize potential programs, and to establish overall investment governance for the organisation.
“We’re a very traditional organisation in terms of our delivery practises and culture, so there was a lot to be learned and changed in the organisation,” said Grant Wood, Head of Enterprise Delivery Center of Excellence at AusPost.

Before using Shibumi, AusPost’s processes were static, with data living in Excel spreadsheets and reported in PowerPoint presentations. “Reports were timeconsuming to create and outdated as soon as the person stopped typing them,” said Matthew McCormack, Portfolio Development Manager at AusPost. “As an organisation, one of our biggest problems was the manual time it took to execute business flows—lots of our best people spent all day cutting and pasting information from one system to another. There was so much waste.”

AusPost sought a robust, automated system that could track and report on progress of its 400+ initiatives with greater transparency, in the hope that would inform better decision-making at every level. With this visibility,

“Shibumi … made visible the challenges in how we inherently worked. We needed that because when we can see it, it can be fixed.”

GRANT WOOD, HEAD OF ENTERPRISE DELIVERY CENTER OF EXCELLENCE

Solution

Use Shibumi to Manage Entire Initiative Lifecycles and Visualize Progress Against Plans

AusPost introduced Shibumi into its operations and immediately began capturing valuable information about initiatives across its strategic portfolio. AusPost used Shibumi to assemble a bottom-up view of all initiatives and their anticipated timelines and value, establishing an aggregate baseline. Shibumi also enabled AusPost to create a top-down view that highlighted enterprise objectives to guide overall strategy.

AusPost used Shibumi’s dashboard capabilities to map initiatives to the company’s overall strategy and to help AusPost’s leadership team identify crucial gaps. “Shibumi made our lives uncomfortable because it made visible the challenges in how we inherently worked,” Wood said. “We needed that because when we can see it, it can be fixed.”

With a comprehensive view of where resources were being allocated and how each initiative was progressing, AusPost was able to identify process improvement opportunities, to budget spend and time appropriately, and even to identify valuable initiatives that were previously untracked. “We realized we had things that were driving our business forward—initiatives that would deliver real value—but they weren’t being tracked appropriately and therefore weren’t being prioritized or governed,” McCormack said. The new visibility Shibumi offered extended across AusPost’s extensive portfolio, ranging from these previously overlooked “business-as-usual” initiatives to the management of physical assets like real estate investments.

Shibumi’s introduction provided a “powerful moment” for the business, McCormack said: “We identified a number of things we needed to do differently.

“Shibumi sparked really important conversations about how we run the business.”

-Matthew McCormack, Portfolio Development Manager

Results

100% Visibility, Driving Better Strategic Execution and Increased Value

“Shibumi gives us a single view of change, which is powerful. We can now manage initiatives, anticipate change, and prioritize appropriately,” McCormack said.

Time-based measurements help AusPost visualize the time horizon on ROI against resources available to guide decision-making. Color-coded dashboards enable leadership to understand the portfolio’s health at a glance, both holistically and at the group and initiative levels. “Pre-Shibumi, consolidating and reporting that kind of information took multiple teams, many days,” McCormack said. “Now, risk and spend profiles, highperforming and troubled initiatives, and more are all easily identified at a glance, with the relevant data to back it up a few clicks away.”

AusPost continues to unlock value with Shibumi. The firm plans to expand its use of Shibumi to inform quarterly business and resource capacity planning, to streamline financial forecasting, and to enhance digital governance. “We now have far better information available to us to assess how we’re tracking against our forecast at the individual project and aggregated level,” Wood said. “With Shibumi, we’re able to slice and dice all that information more granularly so we can take action to improve things.”

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