Case Study: Merging two big cable companies

Our client, a large American investment company, with over 16bn EUR yearly turnover in Cable business in Europe, decided to update their investments and add another cable company to their portfolio in one of their countries. The purchase resulted in one country with two Cable companies, owned by the same holding. Soon the CIO and CTO asked the agile practice to start merging the business functions and the technical stack of both the companies.

The start

With 150+ core operation applications, such as billing, middleware, databases, and many other small applications, distributed over a large amount of hardware across the country) combined with a large number of people, merging the two looked like an impossible task. 

The roll-out

With simple scaled Scrum, as was applied in both the Cable companies in isolation. Then with around 150 applications had to be reduced to circa 15. The CTO suggested to reduce the number to be the most effective and efficient. Being unable to create feature teams due to legal limitations our Agile Coaches designed a scaled framework that used parts from SAFe, LeSS and Nexus Scrum.  

Our agile coaches decided to make a divide between web & app and middleware and back-end systems as most of them functioned via a central API (abstraction layer) that sat in the middle—making the divide created two adjacent rooms, which contributed to efficiency.

Big room planning

One of the main contributors to the success of this initiative was in big-room programme increment planning (PI Planning), as used from the SAFe framework with the use of the Release Train. The release train helped teams to streamline packets of integrated increments to the 'station', and if they'd miss the release train, it would make it in the next train. 

Where the coaches experienced that the most efficient route is to restructure teams from both sides and structure them as 'feature teams' or '(feature) squads', and then work with a simple scaled Scrum model, in this case, parts of an off-the-shelf framework helped as tools. 

Conclusion

When working with organisational silo's and limitations, the release train and big-room planning (PI Planning) helped very well to align, structure, and understand dependencies, and iterate, to further improve.