Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Start

I work as an executive within the Information Technology department. 

For the last six years, my company was growing through acquisitions.  For the last year, we have been managing through a major divestiture.  During the growth years, providing integrated service offerings was the critical business strategy.  As a result, M&A was considered key.




While every M&A event is unique, with good planning, you can tackle the event it with a set of tools and approaches.  In sports, a coach will work with their team to develop a set of plays and practice these plays.  So, when game time comes, the team has the skills and resources to take advantage of situations as they arise.

In the same way, to support the business, we developed playbooks for M&A activities.    I managed the development of the playbooks, as well as all the IT M&A activities on "game day".  We did some things poorly and tried to learn from our failures.  We did some things well, and we tried to consciously repeat those successes.

My intention is to share these best practices.