From strategy to execution: A tailored sourcing strategy for teams in an agile ecosystem at Alliander

The Challenge

When done right, a strategy helps you achieve your goals. It focuses on both the short and long term and is supported by the entire organization, from the shop floor to management. Moreover, a good strategy is concrete and practical. After all, a document that stays in the drawer is of little use to you.

Exactly the latter was the case at Alliander. Because they could do little with their current sourcing strategy, they turned to Eraneos. The strategy was too top-down oriented, too general and did not lead to realization of the organization’s objectives. How could they implement the sourcing strategy in a practical way that did justice to all the different capabilities within the organization? Moreover, the sourcing strategy had to fit into an agile ecosystem so that it would be recognizable to teams working agile. In summary, Alliander asked if Eraneos could help arrive at a supported sourcing strategy, enabling Agile Release Trains (ARTs) in a rapidly growing agile ecosystem to make sourcing choices. An Agile Release Train is a team of teams working together to achieve shared goals and deliver value to the customer.

The Approach

Eraneos helped Alliander design not something completely new, but something that fit seamlessly into its current workflow and existing processes. One step was added to the procurement process to distinguish the more long-term sourcing strategy from an individual sourcing initiative. By using a standard toolkit (consideration framework) per ART, it is possible to create a (customized) longer-term sourcing strategy per ART. This provides direction and sets a framework for future individual sourcing initiatives of the respective ART.

By approaching it more bottom-up and creating broad support, the teams themselves were given a lot of space and influence. To begin with, an environment analysis provided a clear picture of the scope and environment in which the services are provided by ART. Consider the importance to the organization, the supplier market for the services and the current sourcing issues for ART’s services. Based in part on the environment analysis, the ARTs identified plausible sourcing scenarios. The current sourcing scenario was the starting point as well as one of the scenarios considered in the assessment framework. In this assessment framework, they could weigh and score the various sourcing scenarios against the organization’s central goals and frameworks. Just from the fact that they now have a process, governance and templates had to think about their service strategy in a structured and structural way gave energy and direction.

Together with Eraneos, governance was also established for the sourcing strategy process. Who is involved and responsible in which step of the process? Finally, all information about the process and the different roles was compiled in a sourcing manual. For each step or action in the process, logical moments were chosen that align with activities that ARTs should be doing throughout the year anyway. Other triggers were also identified such as changing laws and regulations, expiration of contracts, etcetera.

Implementation began jointly with Alliander in January 2024. In each phase of the project, procurement staff, architects, MT members and other central stakeholders contributed thoughts and input. To explain to the teams why the new sourcing strategy is important and what they can do with it, Eraneos helped with the implementation in the first phase. She went with them into the country to see how the strategy landed with various teams. After guiding the implementation to some seven teams, Eraneos stepped back. The organization has since continued on its own, with the goal of having all ARTs equipped with a sourcing strategy in the not too distant future.

The Result

Pre-do, participate and do it yourself. With this collaborative approach between Eraneos and the client team, and with the manual in hand, the ARTs at the organization are now able to periodically update their sourcing strategy themselves. The payoff is also in the enthusiasm with which the teams themselves started thinking about the longer term. Extra work was often translated into the deployment of extra people, which was difficult in this scarce labor market. By teaching the organization to think in terms of services instead of activities, Eraneos has shown that buying a service in the market can be a good alternative for scarce resources in the market. We are also now looking at which teams have similar needs so that we can market them as bundled requests rather than separate procurement requests. There is greater visibility into the (long-term) needs of the various teams, which should eventually result in better planning, lower costs and greater efficiency both at the decentralized and central levels.

Both at the team and MT level, the organization is happy that they are demonstrably making meters. As a manager of one of the teams put it, “Absolutely great! Compliments to all of you for pulling this together!” Alliander indicates that things are also coming to light about the performance of certain roles. They see this as a side benefit: they now know where they can still improve. For Eraneos, it is of course good to hear that Alliander is satisfied. In less than a year, we have helped Alliander with an approach, toolset and start of implementation that the organization can use independently. A nice compliment to receive.