Australia Post is the oldest continually operating organization in Australia and is a self-funded government business enterprise with the Australian Government as the sole shareholder.  In 2010, Australia Post needed to diversify to survive, the postal business was declining and they needed new ways to drive revenue. One of the opportunities to present itself, was to take its existing identify services business, i.e. passport, WWC, 100 Point checks and leverage it to increase revenue, offer new best practice biometric services and diversify. They ran an RFP process in 2009 and in March 2010, Daon, a biometrics software security provider and the current e-Gate Australian PassportBorder control supplier won the contract. I was brought in by Daon, to manage the Australia Post contract on their behalf. I was specifically  hired by Daon due to my agile skills and experience, Australia Post had decided to use this project as it’s first large scale agile development project.  The project was to roll out a fully integrated bio-metric identify services solution nationwide into post offices within 9months, an unheard of feat in Australia Post at the time.

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My role was based full time on site at Australia Post, and obviously had a large number of complexities, i.e. distrust associated with vendors, new agile process versus incumbent formal, much slower process, new CEO/project sponsorship and executive  ownership, nationwide roll out, large scale cultural change.

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On the project team, we ran a customised version of large scale agile. I was a Release Train Engineer responsible for two value streams, Retail Services and Back End Services. There were other value streams associated with integrating into Australia Post various systems and external parties such as crimtrac. We worked in two week iterations, delivering software into an integrated environment every 3months, launching live into a retail environment with 1 transaction, WWC, 9months later. Continuing post pilot to build new features allowing more complex identity services, i.e. Passport to be launched with new biometric features and solutions. We finished on site at Australia Post when the solution enabled an Australia Post in house team to create new identity transactions by making configuration changes rather than software changes.