Situation
Our client, a critical national infrastructure operator in the GB energy market, ran a large SAP portfolio spanning S/4HANA and SuccessFactors across its group functions. Delivery was split across several systems integrators, each working to its own methods. The effects compounded: cascading delays, interdependencies nobody owned, duplicated effort, no single view of portfolio risk, and third-party costs that kept climbing.
They needed a partner with no stake in any single workstream, able to sit above the vendor layer and impose one delivery framework. Until then, delivery was unpredictable, teams were slow to absorb new demand, and the in-house capability to build mature delivery methods wasn’t there.
Approach
Valcon came in as an independent delivery management partner, deliberately separate from the incumbent systems integrators, to design and embed a delivery framework the whole organisation could scale.
- A central Agile Centre of Excellence embedded best practice, transparency and benefits realisation in one place.
- A Scaled Agile Release Train was stood up across group functions, retiring the patchwork of vendor-specific methods in favour of a single Agile/Waterfall hybrid that fit the way IT and the business already worked.
- Governance structures, forums and tooling gave the portfolio consistent reporting, interdependency oversight and prioritisation, with every party clear on its role.
Results
Delivery moved from fragmented and vendor-led to unified, business-governed and accountable at every level. The business now sits inside change decisions rather than receiving them, with defined accountabilities between IT and business functions and every team trained and coached in the new approach.
Third-party costs fell. Work no longer started until the business understood the outcome and the benefit, so the money once burned on low-value activity stopped leaking. A single blended framework now runs across every group-function programme, with standardised governance, tooling and reporting drawn from one source of data in Jira. Cross-functional teams cut the total headcount needed as dependencies fell away, and business, IT and the systems integrators all update the same records directly.
Interdependency oversight and prioritisation improved enough to remove the cascading delays, weeks and months at a time, that had been eroding milestone confidence. With the Centre of Excellence driving one method and one set of reporting, every party works from a single source of truth.
Make procurement-led transformation deliver more value
Valcon helps senior teams turn complex supplier ecosystems, delivery risk and transformation spend into clearer control, stronger outcomes and measurable impact.
