A year after a deal closes, a surprising number of acquired businesses still run two of everything: two sales teams with two rate cards, two platforms, two finance systems. The org chart, meanwhile, was integrated in month two: because the org chart is the one thing the leadership team can see from where it sits.
Sequence by visibility to the customer
We set the order of an integration by one question: what will the customer notice first? One sales conversation and one rate card, usually. Then one platform. Then one invoice. The organisation follows the work, not the other way round, and the synergy case starts moving in month two instead of month fourteen.
9 months
two publishers to one operating model
How it was measured
Twelve milestones agreed in week one; the synergy case delivered at 104% of plan. The group's previous integration took three years and was never declared finished.
One plan, one register, one report
Integrations die of parallel plans. Each workstream keeps its own, each reports green, and the programme discovers in month nine that the platform migration assumed a data model the finance workstream had already retired. One plan, one risk register, one monthly report to the board and one weekly report inside the firm, and a programme director with the authority to stop a workstream.
Hand the office over by month six
A programme office run by consultants for two years is a consultancy with a badge. Ours is built to be handed to the client’s finance function by month six, and the fee schedule says so.