Adaptive Mercury Retail Integration Programme
Mercury NZ Limited is a New Zealand electricity generation and multi-product utility retailer of electricity, gas, broadband and mobile telephone services. In 2020, Mercury decided to acquire Trustpower, a market leader in bundled offerings.
The role of the Retail Integration Programme was to bring together the two retail businesses as effectively and efficiently as possible. The merger meant the integration of two distinct cultures, two separate teams, two customer bases, and two sets of technology stacks and business processes, all requiring consolidation into a new and improved Mercury.
Challenge
How might we bring together two organisations, combining the best of both worlds, to create one modern, future fit Mercury.
Results
- Successful programme delivery - delivered early and under budget.
- Establishment of new delivery practices and a way of working allowing the teams to respond to changes around them.
- Cross-functional set up of teams allowing end-to-end delivery of outcomes.
- Cultural integration from “us and them” to “we” through a clear vision, a shared purpose, and cross-functional working.
- Increased transparency and accountability through programme-wide planning (Big Room Planning) and transparent impediment escalation processes.
- Capability uplift in adaptive ways of working of internal Adaptive Practice team as well as the wider Retail integration team.
- Successful Brand change and move to one technology stack for Mercury.
Full Story
The Retail Integration programme, tasked with bringing together the two retail businesses as effectively and efficiently as possible, was selected by the executive team as the key initiative to pilot adaptive ways of working at Mercury. Strategically one of the most important initiatives, it required efficient and effective highly cross-functional collaboration across teams from both organisations to achieve the required outcomes on time.
Radically worked together with the Integration Leadership team to design an adaptive delivery model that would drive the new ways of working through the Integration Programme. The focus was on bringing the two sets of teams together by building a common language that everyone could connect to.
The delivery model helped create a unified understanding of how the teams would be set up in this integrated world, and how they would interact and collaborate with each other for effective delivery of outcomes. It provided a clear set of principles for the work and aligned the leadership and the wider teams on what success looked like and the journey to get there.
Once the programme was underway, teams were given hands-on delivery coaching to embed the new approach. Fully embedding the Radically coaches into the teams helped build internal capability within the organisation along the way.
As part of the approach, Radically in collaboration with the Mercury team led multiple Big Room Planning (BRP) events for the programme which resulted in more transparency and better communication of work and outcomes through the teams.
Radically was integrated into the Mercury Integration team both at the team and leadership level, which helped provide consistency across the programme but also allowed Radically to be able to provide an objective view from across the entire programme.
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