Mergers & Acquisitions Integration Handbook: Helping Companies Realize The Full Value of Acquisitions

CHAPTER 15

Integration Feedback: Lessons Learned

In this chapter, you will learn the following:

• How to collect feedback and assess your integration efforts.
• Lessons from past integrations.

I received a good piece of advice from a manager once: Feedback is a gift. This goes for integration feedback as well.

Any process improvement person worth his or her daily rate can tell you that getting after-action feedback and data ensures that you will improve and optimize your operations. For companies with fairly frequent merger and acquisition activity, getting post-integration feedback is critical to ensuring that you are continually improving.

In effective integration planning, the feedback stage is referred to as lessons learned.

GOALS AND TOOLS OF LESSONS LEARNED

Collecting feedback from all stakeholder groups to continually optimize your integration strategies and tactics can include the following steps:

• At day 100, initiate a formal process to collect feedback from IMO participants and acquired company employees.
• Distribute an employee survey. It should be developed and administered through HR and implemented after any downsizing or reductions in force.
• Make sure the IMO facilitates a lessons-learned meeting with IMO participants and functional leaders to explore the following questions:
  • What integration practices, tools, and processes worked well, and why?
  • What integration practices, tools, and processes need improvement?
  • What communication vehicles worked well?
  • Did the stakeholders ...