In a Merger and Acquisition environment, political
factions are almost certain to exist as legacy employees and new (acquired)
employees jockey for position and, potentially, their jobs.
In this
project, there were quite a few heated words spoken (and in one strange case,
screamed).
At times, we had to ask our sponsor to find people
that could provide us with some much needed data (especially historical data,
where available). It’s only because of
the connections and the persistence of the sponsor that we received the data we
needed to be successful.
Choose your wording carefully. I had to ensure that our observations and
recommendations were presented in such a way as to achieve ‘buy in’, we didn’t
want either legacy or acquired employees to be defensive or dismissive.
Likewise, we had to be very accurate and find some
quick wins, as there was much skepticism from the legacy teams about the
accuracy of the information and recommendations we were making. This issue quickly went away when we were
able to identify some likely bottlenecks that were not on the radar of any of
their teams.
Each phase of the project uncovered likely bottlenecks
and opportunities for improvement for the applications. While we had to work quickly to get to the
finish of the first phase of the project, once we had the report templates and the
CIO presentation format in place, it provided a template to complete the second
and third phase of the project.
The second and third phase consisted of applying any
changes in hardware and replacing the captured data with more recent data.
Success in the first phase will always make the second
and third phases easier and we certainly spent considerably less time trying to
establish and prove our credibility.
I’ll conclude next time
Rich Fronheiser
Chief Marketing Officer
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