IT carve-out at an energy producer

The situation

An internationally operating energy producer headquartered in Germany faced the task of splitting an IT landscape that had grown and become tightly interwoven over many years across several legally independent companies. In an IT carve-out of this scale, almost everything depends on everything else: shared ERP instances, a central identity management, shared networks, data-centre services, hundreds of applications, and a dense web of licence and vendor contracts.

The requirement was clear: each new company had to be independently operational on the cutover date, without the running operation of critical energy infrastructure stalling. What made it harder was that the units had to keep providing IT services to each other during the transition, clearly governed by Transitional Service Agreements (TSA), and that the separation had to be coordinated across countries and therefore across several legal and data-protection regimes.

Our approach

We took on the project management of the IT separation and started with a solid inventory: which systems, data, identities, and contracts will in future belong to which company, and what dependencies exist between them? From this map we built a separation blueprint that defined a path for every application, from the clean split of shared systems through duplication to re-procurement, each with sequence, dependencies, and cutover date.

A key focus was the TSA design: together with the business units we cut the transitional services individually, with a clear scope, service levels, pricing model, and measurable exit criteria, so that each company could leave the transitional services again as early as possible. In parallel we steered the separation of identities and permissions, the split of the networks, and the assignment of licences and contracts to the correct legal entity, a point that is regularly underestimated in carve-outs and otherwise leads to expensive re-licensing.

We planned the actual cutovers to the minute and rehearsed them beforehand in full dress rehearsals, with measured timings and resolved findings. For the critical systems we defined rollback criteria and clear go and no-go decisions. A joint steering body from both sides ensured status reports per service, clean escalation paths, and that the TSA exits did not drift.

The outcome

The new companies started on the cutover date with independently operational IT: employees could log in, core systems and business processes ran, and the operation of the energy infrastructure remained continuously assured. The intensified support in the first weeks after the cutover absorbed the typical start-up issues in a controlled way instead of letting them become disruptions to daily business.

Thanks to the individually cut and measurably priced TSA, everyone involved kept the transition phase under control and was able to wind down the mutual dependencies as planned. In the end, each company had a clearly separated, documented IT as a sound basis for independent ongoing operation.