healthAlliance: Transformation
The Client
healthAlliance is New Zealand’s largest healthcare provider, delivering services across a vast geographical area of nearly 20,000 square kilometers and serving almost 40% of the country’s population. The organization plays a critical role in managing healthcare infrastructure and digital services for millions of New Zealanders.
The Challenge
healthAlliance was operating within traditional business and IT models that limited agility and responsiveness. The complexity of supporting over 2,000 applications, combined with the rapidly evolving demands of healthcare services, created pressure for a significant transformation in both mindset and operational practices. They needed to shift towards more flexible, collaborative, and efficient ways of working to enhance delivery speed, service quality, and adaptability.
The Solution
Citrus Global partnered with healthAlliance to facilitate a comprehensive business transformation focused on embedding Lean, Agile, and DevOps principles across the organisation.
Mindset Shift
Citrus Global helped transition healthAlliance’s teams from conventional project management and operational silos into a culture that values continuous improvement, collaboration, and customer-centric delivery.
New Ways of Working
Beginning with existing teams, Citrus Global introduced Lean and Agile methodologies tailored to the healthcare context, ensuring the approach supported both ongoing operations and new development activities. This included iterative delivery, cross-functional team collaboration, and faster feedback loops.
Scalable Agile Adoption
Following initial successes, Citrus Global extended Agile frameworks to major projects, standardizing Lean-Agile and DevOps practices to streamline workflows, reduce bottlenecks, and improve release cadence.
Sustained Support and Change Management
Citrus Global worked alongside healthAlliance’s Digital and Mobility division, which supports the extensive application landscape and change requests, embedding agile tools and practices that enhanced transparency, issue resolution, and stakeholder engagement.
Results
This transformation not only modernised healthAlliance’s operational capabilities but also established a sustainable foundation for innovation and growth aligned with the evolving healthcare landscape.
Enhanced Delivery Efficiency
Agile adoption accelerated project timelines and improved the predictability of releases, enabling healthAlliance to respond more rapidly to emerging healthcare needs.
Improved Collaboration
Cross-functional teams became more cohesive and empowered, breaking down silos between development, operations, and support functions.
Operational Resilience
The integration of DevOps practices reduced downtime and improved system reliability across the large portfolio of healthcare applications.
Culture of Continuous Improvement
Lean principles fostered ongoing process optimization and a proactive approach to quality and risk management.
1.9m people
Healthcare Coverage
14 Hospitals
and 6 Emergency Departments
81 Operating Theatres
and 155,000 procedures per annum
3100 beds
and 1.1 million bed-days per annum