Enexis: Many Teams, One Delivery Rhythm

Enexis distributes electricity and gas across large parts of the north, east and south of the Netherlands. Behind the cables and pipes sits a growing estate of software: systems for grid planning, asset data, customer connections and the field engineers who do the work outside.

That software was built by a growing number of agile teams. Each team worked well on its own, with its own sprints, its own planning and its own way of tracking work. The trouble started where teams met.

When one team needs something from another, agile at team level stops helping. Each team plans its own sprint, so a dependency is often found when the work is already late: the data a feature needs is scheduled two sprints after the feature itself. Priorities differ from team to team, sprints start on different days, and nobody has the full picture of what will be delivered when.

New team members had a second problem: every team explained the way of working differently, and the documentation lived in many places. Getting productive took longer than it should.

SAFe, the Scaled Agile Framework, keeps the agile team as the basic unit and adds a shared rhythm above it. The teams that work on the same part of the business form an Agile Release Train: typically five to twelve teams, fifty to a hundred and twenty-five people, who plan, deliver and review together.

The train runs in Program Increments, or PIs, of eight to twelve weeks. Each PI starts with PI planning, where every team plans the coming increment in the same room, then runs four development iterations with a joint system demo after each one, and ends with an Innovation and Planning iteration for improvement, learning and preparing the next PI. A few roles hold it together: the Release Train Engineer runs the train, Product Management sets the priorities, the System Architect guards the technical direction, and in every team a Product Owner and Scrum Master do what they did before.

Click through one Program Increment below to see what happens when.

The heart of SAFe is PI planning. Instead of each team discovering halfway through a sprint that it is waiting on someone else, every dependency is put on the table at the start, and the teams agree who delivers what and when. The board below shows four teams and their features for one increment. Switch between teams planning alone and teams planning together.

SAFe is a framework, not a recipe. Our job was to turn it into a delivery model that fitted Enexis: the planning cadence, how PI planning would run, how teams would coordinate across the train, and what each role was expected to do. We designed those processes and worked with the delivery leads of the teams to keep the model consistent while it rolled out, team by team.

A model only works if people can learn it. So we built the onboarding materials and the course content that took new team members from their first day to working in the train, and we created and maintained one SharePoint environment for everything: process documentation, training, templates and the working materials teams used every iteration.

At SolvX we believe agile working is the best way to manage software development, and we work that way ourselves. Software is rarely fully understood before it is built. Requirements change, technology surprises, and users only know what they need once they see something working.

Agile turns that uncertainty into an advantage. Small increments mean feedback arrives in weeks, not months. Priorities can change without throwing work away. Risks show up early, while they are still cheap to fix. And teams own the result, not just their tasks. SAFe does not replace any of that; it is how you keep those benefits when one team becomes ten.

The result was a consistent delivery model for the agile teams working on one of the largest operational infrastructure portfolios in the Netherlands, and one onboarding path into it. Teams planned together and moved in the same rhythm, and new colleagues learned the way of working from one source instead of many.

• The SAFe delivery processes used across the teams, from the planning cadence and PI planning to cross-team coordination.
• Onboarding materials and course content, so new team members could get productive quickly.
• A SharePoint environment for the process documentation, training and working materials, created and maintained by us.
• Coordination with the delivery leads of the teams, to keep the model consistent as it rolled out.