The deal closed, and your team has been busily moving along at a quick clip to get everything moved and conveyed before the day 1 deadline. However, as is common with most IT projects, a few snags cropped up and you’re getting close to the end of the TSA agreement.

What are your options?

The terms of the TSA are designed to allow for some support and coverage to facilitate the transition, but not intended as long term support or hosting. The company divesting doesn’t really want to be in the managed service space or continue to maintain a line they are exiting so it is in their interest to ensure the terms are as short as possible with steep fees for breaching contract.

As the one integrating the the new line of business, it is easy to be optimistic about the integration process. After all, it is just migrating a few new employees, and a couple of apps with data. However, even if you apply the 20% rule to pad your deadlines, there will be some challenges that can eat into that buffer (famously saw it take about 3 months to realize there was a fundamental flaw in how one company wanted to migrate data due to the fact that they could only configure/test once a month).

As you get close to that deadline, it is time for the team to ask:

  • What is the bare minimum required to cut over?
  • How much is really dependent upon the parent company that we must migrate/convey?
  • What is the risk if we cut over now and not able to finish?
  • What would it cost to renegotiate the TSA to extend our runway a little longer based on what is remaining?

The last item is the part that is not impossible, but could also be the most expensive depending on what’s remaining. The other three are the more typical PM trade-off questions asked when your milestone is as firm as Christmas Day.

The best way out of this situation is to ensure that your TSA time-frame is realistic at the beginning and that both parties are interested in seeing this through.

Looking at the networking example I cited above, part of the delay was process with one of the parties, the other part was a fundamental misunderstanding by the team in how a product they had never used before worked in their environment. Addressing just one of these, would have been enough to have avoided the end of the road.

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