Telstra
Digital E2E Delivery Process (Service Design)
Services:
Contracted by
Deloitte Digital
Insight
During my time at Deloitte Digital I was seconded into Telstra to help rationalise and redesign their end-to-end digital delivery process. Telstra’s internal teams were struggling with inconsistencies across the Idea Assessment, Prioritisation, Discovery, and Evolve phases, and there was no single, unified model of how digital initiatives were supposed to move from conception through to release. Each department had its own interpretation of the process, and these misalignments were causing delays, duplicated effort, governance gaps and confusion about ownership. My role was essentially a service design engagement, the only time in my career where I stepped fully into a service designer’s shoes.
The goal was to create a single, authoritative view of Telstra’s delivery lifecycle that could be used across business, IT, product, PMO and the Digital organisation. I conducted interviews with leads, BAs, PMs, capability owners and governance teams to understand not just the “official” process but also the real-world behaviour that was happening behind the scenes. From these conversations I was able to piece together the full operational workflow, including approvals, backlog management, scoring frameworks, release validation, feature elaboration loops, discovery rituals, resource planning, financial checkpoints, and the relationships between business and IT systems such as RTC, JIRA and DPT tooling.
Idea
I then transformed this complex ecosystem into a set of large-format service blueprints. Each one visualised the full lifecycle as a flowing sequence of loops, decision points and iterations, making something that was previously opaque feel simple and intuitive to understand. The master diagram showed the four major phases — Ideas Assessment, Prioritisation & Valuation, Discovery, and Evolve — each with detailed sub-steps, inputs, outputs, artefacts, governance moments and system touchpoints. I used a consistent visual language so that stakeholders could immediately see where decisions were made, where value was assessed, and where teams needed to collaborate or hand off work. Because Telstra required clarity on how different roles engaged with the process, I also produced variations of the blueprint tailored specifically for Digital BAs, IT BAs, IT Project Managers, and other functions. These diagrams displayed the same underlying workflow but emphasised each role’s responsibilities at every stage. This became incredibly useful for onboarding and for ensuring that teams understood precisely when and how they were expected to contribute. Alongside these, I mapped the financial and systems-related layers, showing how cost approval, estimation, forecasting and tooling integrated into the broader delivery framework.
Impact
The final result was a comprehensive, visually elegant operational model that Telstra adopted as its single source of truth. It was used in governance forums, delivery planning, training sessions and PMO alignment discussions. For many teams, it became the first time they had seen the entire process laid out clearly from end to end. The blueprints helped reduce ambiguity, removed duplicated effort, and made communication between business and IT far more efficient. They also provided Deloitte Digital with a solid foundation for subsequent transformation and optimisation work. This project is one of the clearest examples in my career of turning extreme organisational complexity into something simple, structured and actionable. It allowed me to use service design thinking, information design, and systems mapping at a level that not many projects require. Looking back, I’m proud of how these diagrams not only captured Telstra’s delivery framework, but actually helped the organisation work together more effectively.
