Complexity to Clarity: Woodside Energy’s Integration Modernisation Journey

Woodside Energy is a global energy company headquartered in Australia and operating across three continents, providing the energy to help people lead better lives. Following its merger with BHP’s petroleum business in 2022, Woodside became a larger supplier of energy to the world through its expanded global portfolio — bringing new challenges and opportunities in technology operations, integration, and innovation.

Eighteen months before their migration deadline, the integration team faced a digital landscape that had reached crossroads. The legacy integration platform worked, but three realities made change inevitable. Many integrations still ran but served no purpose, consuming capacity nobody actually needed. Maintenance consumed more hours than innovation. The business was not slowing down, but with only a small pool of technology specialists available, integrations became a bottleneck to scaling.

The organisation needed an integration approach that could keep pace.

Three Goals, One Unmovable Deadline

The integration team defined clear objectives for their next-generation integration platform:

1. Empower delivery teams to build integrations independently, lowering barriers to entry.
2. Ensure reliability, including fault tolerance and auto-scaling, without the maintenance burden.
3. Accelerate the journey from design to delivery, using predefined integration patterns.

After rigorous stress testing, Workato joined Woodside’s suite of integration tools to achieve these goals.

Here’s an example of how a connectivity layer connects core systems to organisation-wide delivery teams:

Planning revealed unexpected complexity. Determining what needed migration versus deletion proved harder than anticipated. Some teams claimed they still used integrations but could not articulate why. Others had no idea that their applications were calling specific APIs daily. Many integrations predated the project team members, with no documentation available. Reverse engineering became routine.

The unmovable deadline loomed: no one wanted to renew the old software licence.

The Green Cell Strategy

The team made a simple but important decision early: break delivery into the smallest possible pieces. A spreadsheet tracked every integration through phases from design to development, client testing, and support handover. Every row represented one integration. Every column, a phase. Every cell received a status.

Completed cells turned green.

The team met daily to review the spreadsheet. Not glamorous, but it worked. Team members supported each other, kept things moving, and spotted gaps early. What mattered most was that everyone could see progress. As the green cells spread across the spreadsheet, confidence grew. The team, stakeholders, and project sponsors all had the same view, and that shared visibility kept people believing the deadline was within reach. 

Go-live came as a series of releases, not a big bang. Independent integrations went live immediately. Dependent ones were grouped together only when necessary. High-risk integrations were tackled first to mitigate exposure. Each release added confidence in the platform’s stability and performance.

Over time, the team established guardrails and patterns that would hold up long after the migration was done:

1. Reimagining Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) to standardise how quickly automations are released
2. Putting in place Automation Quality & Security (AQS) best practices to govern the quality of automations
3. Using pre-built connectors to swiftly and robustly integrate across a breadth of core systems
4. Using shared functions to promote modularity and reusability

Lessons from the Migration

Five lessons stood out:

1. Complex migrations demand generous contingency. Woodside started two to three months early. Every extra day counted. Thin contingency buffers disappeared fast.
2. Don’t let roadblocks become the goal. Some blockers took significant time and energy to resolve, but the team focused on what actually mattered: getting solutions built and delivering value. Fixing a design phase issue felt good, but it wasn’t the finish line.
3. Technical problems need technical problem solvers. No amount of planning eliminates all issues. Having people who could get into the detail and figure things out in real time made the difference.
4. Balance optimism with scepticism. Early on, the team leaned too heavily toward optimism. Assumptions about simple changes, such as clients only needing to update endpoints, created surprises. A healthy dose of scepticism early on would have saved a few headaches later.
5. Keep moving. Not every integration had a clear owner. Not every problem was anticipated. The journey was not perfect and did not need to be. The goal was delivering value, not perfection.

What Changed

The migration delivered results across four areas:

1. Speed to innovate: With predefined integration patterns in place, the time from idea to live integration dropped significantly.
2. Empowerment: Delivery teams gained the ability to build integrations themselves, eliminating bottlenecks.
3. Reliability: Maintenance hours dropped dramatically, with robust monitoring making troubleshooting faster and more transparent.
4. Cost savings: Lower maintenance costs and reduced development hours translated to hard savings.

The bigger shift was cultural. Teams stopped waiting for integrations to be built for them. Once people could build their own, the pace of delivery across the organisation changed.

What’s Next

With the migration behind them, Woodside’s integration team is now focused on expanding self-service capabilities across delivery teams. New use cases continue to emerge as the business picks up pace.