How to Keep Your Integration Plan Simple

This play is designed to maintain alignment between your integration team by keeping your integration plan simple.

Play by

VP, Strategy, Planning and Operations at Omnissa

About the play

This play is designed to maintain alignment between your integration team by keeping your integration plan simple. By keeping it simple, the integration is easier to understand, easier to remember, and easier to communicate with team members.

Preparation

Oftentimes, especially in a huge M&A team, a lot of people don’t understand the rationale behind their work. The rationale gets lost in translation and team members often find themselves doing a specific task without knowing what they are trying to accomplish.

According to Jim, simplicity is key to success. By keeping it simple, the integration is easier to understand, easier to remember, and easier to communicate with team members.

People

Deal lead, Project Manager, Deal Sponsor, Integration Lead, Integration team

Difficulty

Easy

Materials

Team collaboration, Visual Aids, Listening Skills

Time

30 mins to 1 hour

Running the Play:

Communicate the End State

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Set up a meeting with everybody involved in the deal. They need to understand what is the strategic rationale of the transaction and what is the end state going to look like for the acquired company.
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This meeting typically involves key integration team members and is led by the Project Integration Lead:

GTM Team
Product Team
HR Team
Deal Business Sponsor (or decision-making proxy)
Legal Team
Project Manager
Finance team
Ops team (infrastructure)

Work Your Way Backward

From there, figure out what are the necessary steps that you need to take in order to get to where you want to go from where you are today. From your end state, branch out to major milestones, and then sub milestones, to the micro work streams.

Set a Framework

Before the meeting ends, your team needs to answer four questions that all tie back to the strategy of the deal.

What do you plan to do with the people?
What are you going to do with Go-To-Market?
What are you going to do with infrastructure?
What are you going to do with everything else?

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Stick to 5 by 5

And in the interest of keeping it simple, all of the questions need to be answered with a maximum of 5 bullets per question, and a maximum of 5 words per bullet.