Balancing Competing Initiatives
By William Blandford, Managing Director at Blandford Associates and Member of The Board of M&A Standards
I know, your first thought is, “What does Speed Dating have to do with mergers and acquisitions?” But if you think about it for a minute, it makes perfect sense. Let me help you along. "Speed Dating" is defined as an organized process in which participants have one-on-one conversations, typically limited to less than ten minutes, for the purpose of getting to know others. I have used this "Speed Dating" process to identify and address the complex relationships among competing initiatives (referred to as interdependencies) with functional integration teams for acquisitions, especially in more complicated cases.
Example
Consider the IT teams working on the integration of a purchased business that was carved out from another company. In this situation, IT must support both the existing business and, via a Transition Service Agreement (TSA), the business being carved out. In this hypothetical case, 6 functional Business IT teams are migrating and/or implementing business systems for their respective functions, and 4 IT Infrastructure teams are migrating and/or implementing the IT infrastructure for the acquired business – all in the same time frame before the end of the TSA.
Approximately 4 weeks after the start of integration, the teams have put together plans to implement their respective projects. I have found this to be the perfect time to implement the Speed Dating process as part of an interdependency workshop. This exercise is instrumental in identifying the dependencies among the teams and the potential conflicts, especially with content and timing.