Hi everyone,

The previous week was Golden Week in Japan. For those not familiar with it, the concept would be similar to the end of year Christmas and New Years holiday within the last couple of weeks of the year. In Japan, there are 5 national holidays interspersed within a single week. The one thing I didn’t realize is that, just like the US Thanksgiving holiday, this is when everyone travels. Biggest difference: much nicer weather in May than November.

For me, this was an excuse to publish a new article while sitting at the airport getting ready to return to the US. The article itself takes a look at the kind of optimizations that are common during the integration that will destroy the longer term value. The post can be found at: https://www.atelier-solutions.com/what-are-you-optimizing-for/.

While the theme I took with this post, and a video post on LinkedIn highlight’s the user journey and the fact that it is missing from consideration as the integration pieces get divided up, A former colleague, Rahul Soman, was inspired to write an additional post (https://thegreythoughts.substack.com/p/the-m-and-a-workstream-nobody-owns) highlighting the fact that it maybe due to a lack of responsibility on the management side.

Thinking a little more about it, the common theme is the siloification of the integration process. We may call it workstreams in the post-M&A integration, but ultimately, the focus (and danger) is on each deliverable and will more than likely fall along organizational boundaries.

This is where care must be taken to avoid falling into the trap of verification based on the workstream and not testing the full flow (having your testers log into the system, perform some basic operations to verify things work before the cutover, etc.). Otherwise, you will end up with the case of having a gap in the middle that is not owned or monitored by anyone.

You may say that you are not big enough to be impacted by this, and I’d agree if you have about 100 employees or less, but I would argue that the gap will still be there, even if they all live in a SaaS platform.

A little something to think about.

Cheers, Chris