Utilities today operate under pressures that were virtually unknown just a few years ago. The energy transition is transforming generation, grid infrastructure, and sales simultaneously. Customers expect digital services, ranging from tariff apps to self-service portals. Regulatory requirements change frequently and often at short notice. In this environment, software development teams must respond quickly to new demands without compromising operational stability or quality.
To successfully address these challenges, the software development organization at Leipziger Stadtwerke continued its agile transformation journey with a clear objective: to make its growing agile practice effective, transparent, and manageable across teams, locations, and external partners.
For Leipziger Stadtwerke, agility delivers tangible business benefits: a shorter path from idea to usable solution, improved quality, greater transparency into development progress, and the ability to prioritize the most important initiatives with limited resources. However, agile methods and agile thinking only realize their full potential when they are embraced across all levels of the organization and aligned across larger organizational units and multiple teams.
The following project illustrates how Leipziger Stadtwerke and Campana & Schott worked together to achieve that goal.
Agile Transformation at Leipziger Stadtwerke
Take a closer look at the project below.
- Client: Stadtwerke Leipzig GmbH
- Industry: Energy & Utilities
- Headquarters: Leipzig, Germany
- Employees: 810
- Website: Leipziger Stadtwerke − Energy for Leipzig an surroundings
Initial Situation
Leipziger Stadtwerke is one of Germany’s leading municipal energy providers. Its IT organization develops software solutions for a wide range of business needs, from B2B applications and customer-facing apps to grid-related solutions. The organization operates across multiple locations, including Leipzig, external service providers, and a development unit in Poland.
The software development organization had already begun its agile transformation several years earlier. Scrum had been implemented, agile practices had become part of everyday team workflows, and core routines were firmly established.
The next stage of development was initiated by the Head of Department and his leadership team. They began to evaluate the software development organization from a broader perspective, with the goal of creating greater structure, transparency, and manageability across teams, locations, and external partners.
At this stage, the key question was no longer whether to work in an agile way, but how to transform the existing agile practice into a sustainable and scalable organizational model.
To challenge its thinking and support the next phase of organizational development, the department engaged Campana & Schott as a strategic sparring partner.
Objectives
- Further develop the existing agile practice and transform it into a sustainable and scalable operating model.
- Refine roles, responsibilities, and decision-making mechanisms to ensure clarity across teams, locations, and external partners.
- Increase transparency and governance across software development activities to strengthen prioritization and accelerate delivery.
- Establish consistent collaboration within a distributed organization and systematically reduce friction at organizational interfaces.
- Transform implicit knowledge into a documented, organization-wide knowledge base to ensure long-term sustainability.
- Create a robust foundation for continuously evolving collaboration models in a structured and controlled way.
Approach
Assess the Current State
Campana & Schott did not enter the engagement with a predefined target model. Instead, we acted as a sparring partner at a stage where the further development of the software development organization was already underway.
The engagement began with a structured assessment of the existing organization and ways of working. Through interviews, document reviews, and a maturity assessment model, we evaluated how agile practices were actually being applied within software development, where they were already delivering value, and where inconsistencies or structural gaps were limiting the effectiveness of scaled agility.
Beyond individual team practices, the focus was placed on collaboration across the software development organization, including product strategy, organizational structures, interface management, and coordination with external partners and distributed development units.
Based on these findings, we jointly identified key areas for improvement and defined the next development steps. The result was a target vision for an operating model tailored to the organizational realities of Leipziger Stadtwerke while enabling a consistent evolution of agile ways of working.
Develop the Operating Model
Building on the assessment, Campana & Schott worked closely with the Head of Department and his leadership team to develop a target vision and operating model.
Rather than implementing a standard framework, the focus was on designing an organizational model tailored to the specific structure and requirements of the software development organization. Roles, responsibilities, and interfaces were refined to better align strategy, prioritization, and execution, creating a continuous, value oriented development process capable of adapting to changing requirements.
Campana & Schott provided methodological guidance and strategic sparring throughout the process, while the content and design decisions remained firmly owned by the organization itself.
Validate the Operating Model in Practice
The newly designed operating model was subsequently rolled out by the Head of Department and his team within the day-to-day operations of the software development organization.
Over several months, the model was applied, tested, and refined in real-world conditions. This process revealed which elements already worked effectively and where further clarification was required, particularly in cross-team collaboration and coordination with external partners and service providers.
Campana & Schott continued to support this phase by facilitating reflection, providing methodological guidance, and helping the organization learn from practical experience.
Evaluate and Refine the Operating Model
After approximately six months, the software development organization conducted a structured review of the operating model together with Campana & Schott.
The objective was to systematically evaluate how effectively the model supported day-to-day operations, identify remaining sources of friction, and determine which elements still needed to be strengthened to enable consistent collaboration.
By building on the initial assessment, the evaluation highlighted both measurable progress and remaining areas for optimization.
An Agile Playbook as the Foundation for Transparency and Sustainable Adoption
The assessment revealed a clear need for a consolidated and authoritative description of ways of working, roles, and artifacts that would be easily accessible to everyone involved, both internally and externally. This led to the creation of the Agile Playbook: a structured guide and living documentation of the agile delivery model and the organizational framework supporting it.
The Playbook served two purposes. First, it consolidated practices and approaches that had already proven successful in day-to-day operations. Second, it defined critical elements that were still missing. These were identified collaboratively, aligned with stakeholders across and beyond the organization, and translated into a consistent and easily accessible structure.
Developing the Playbook Through Agile Principles
The first version of the Agile Playbook was created using the same agile principles it was designed to promote.
A product vision, prioritized backlog, and dedicated team structure were established at the outset. Over a series of sprints, the Playbook evolved into a minimum viable product (MVP), which was published directly within the organization. In this way, the approach reflected both the content and the mindset behind the initiative: agile ways of working were documented using agile methods.
Campana & Schott assumed methodological responsibility as Scrum Master and coached the Product Owner throughout the process. Subject matter expertise and practical insights were provided by representatives from the development teams and product owners at Leipziger Stadtwerke.
Built on Confluence, the Agile Playbook became a centrally accessible and maintainable knowledge base, available to all teams and serving as a single source of truth for agile collaboration across the organization.
Challenges
- Knowledge Resided in Individuals: Much of the organization’s knowledge existed implicitly and was not formally documented, creating risks for efficiency and delivery quality.
- Inconsistent Practices: Agile methods were interpreted and applied differently across teams, external service providers, and the development unit in Poland.
- Distributed Organization: Collaboration across internal teams, external partners, and nearshore development resources required clearly defined structures and interfaces.
- Resource Constraints: Fluctuating development capacity created additional operational complexity.
Key Success Factors
Focus on Organizational Design: The goal was not to introduce additional methods, but to evolve the organizational structure of the software development organization.
Ownership Within the Organization: Content development and implementation remained the responsibility of the Head of Department and his team, while Campana & Schott acted as a sparring partner and methodological advisor.
Iterative Development: The operating model was tested, reflected upon, and continuously refined in practice rather than fully designed upfront.
Objective Foundation: A shared maturity model provided transparency regarding the current state and served as a reliable basis for decision-making.
Institutionalized Knowledge: Implicit knowledge was documented and made accessible across the organization.
Consistent Methodology: The Agile Playbook itself was developed through iterative sprints, allowing objectives, content, and resource allocation to evolve over time.
Results
With the operating model validated in day-to-day operations, Leipziger Stadtwerke now has a consistent, flexible, and resilient foundation for software development.
Roles, responsibilities, and processes are clearly aligned across teams. Collaboration across locations and external partners has become more transparent and efficient.
The organization has experienced measurable improvements, including reduced coordination effort, faster decision-making, and significantly accelerated onboarding of new employees and external partners. Transparency regarding priorities, progress, and dependencies has increased substantially, resulting in sustainable improvements in both development speed and quality.
The Agile Playbook consolidates these ways of working into a single, authoritative source of truth. It makes processes, roles, and artifacts accessible to everyone involved, preserves institutional knowledge, and provides a common framework for collaboration across the organization.
The Head of Department and his team assessed both the project journey and the outcomes as highly successful.
The project also reinforced a broader insight: agile transformation is not a one-time project, but an ongoing organizational capability. Its impact extends far beyond the introduction of agile methods. Sustainable transformation emerges when organizations embrace the systemic dimensions of agility, including leadership, strategic alignment, governance, and mindset, while continuously evolving an organizational model that reflects their unique context.
In a rapidly changing industry such as energy and utilities, this creates the foundation for consistently prioritizing customer needs, maintaining high quality standards, and responding effectively to emerging challenges.
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#Business Transformation
#Agile Transformation
#Organizational Development
#Energy & Infrastructure
