Agile Integration Planning

Integration is arguably the most important part of any acquisition. The ROI of your deal is purely based on how well you integrate the acquired company into your organization. And while that is true, integration is also the most challenging part. You need to combine two different companies and make it into one big company.

A traditional waterfall M&A approach is highly inefficient, which is why most forward-thinking practitioners have started using an Agile framework in their M&A process.

Agile M&A allows you to be flexible and easily update your plans as new information comes to light. Safe to say that this is one of the best ways to do M&A that will let you close deals faster and capture value more efficiently.

But before you can apply Agile principles into your integration plan, there are specific considerations that you have to meet first.

At the very least, you need to have buy-in from the corp dev people that you will be involved early in the transaction, especially after an LOI has been issued. Knowing about the deal gives you enough runway to start preparing how you want to inject some of the Agile practices into your upcoming integration plan.

You also need enough time to socialize how you execute these agile principles. You need buy-in from everyone for this to work.

Another important requirement is for you to at least have an idea who the people you will be working with are. Just a big picture of who they are and what their role is will suffice.

Once you are informed about the transaction, you need to start formulating who will be in your steering committee. This will help you understand the value of the transaction and who are the people who can make this a successful integration.  

However, if you have met all of these considerations and you want to start applying agile principles in your integration planning, head on to the M&A Science Academy and watch this course, featuring John Morada, Senior Director at ICE Mortgage Technology.

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