In mid 2024 the Australian Sports Commission started a project to move its websites to a more modern CMS. We were asked to help use this opportunity to create a better understanding of the needs of community coaches, and a hybrid ASC/Tobias team was created to do this.

Before we planned any work I created a reverse brief and presented it to our team and stakeholders, clarifying the goals of the project, our proposed approach, and clearly defining what we would deliver in the tight timeframe. Once the reverse brief was accepted I created a tight project plan and our teams worked together to make sure all the activities in the plan were distributed in a way that  we could still deliver in our 6 week window in the face of disruptions or unpredicted direction changes. We used rituals borrowed from agile processes such as daily standups, informal check-ins across different functional teams, and retros to actively fine tune our team culture and keep everyone engaged and high performing.

We were lucky enough to have a very capable team, so when two different team members contracted covid during this project, thanks to our planning we were able to redistribute responsibilities amongst ourselves. With this extra pressure the supportive team structure we created ended up being the most important element that led to our team's success. We also had regular check-ins with technical and business partners throughout the project, inviting them to our meetings and rituals and creating a project board to help our partners and stakeholders see our progress, building confidence and identifying any missteps in directions early. During these six weeks we interviewed community coaches across Australia, ranging from AFL to martial arts, to try and understand their needs from ASC’s digital presences. I designed the overall work programme and defined the interview cohort and interview guide structure. I designed and ran our daily and weekly rituals, supported our team, and contributed hands on to interviews, analysis and the final reporting of our findings.