Summary: When integrating the tech post acquisition, you need to look at it from a process level first. Once you have identified the processes that don’t exist or differ from what you have and where you’re going, then you can start looking at how to migrate the data and worry about the rest of the tech.
You are the majority. Leaders who may have a small tech team or rely on outsourced experts. They help keep the lights on and help when needed. For the rest, you would try to phone a friend, or nowadays reach out to ask AI.
However, you just acquired a company and everyone feels overwhelmed. You have bigger things to deal with that don’t include figuring out how to bring over the financials or employee data. However, you don’t have to go it alone. This guide is for you. It doesn’t matter if you are in operations, finance, or HR.
What I will share is my approach to breaking down the initial pieces so that you aren’t completely lost. The intent is to sort out what most of the big boulders are so that you have a better idea what needs to be done and what to ask for.
What I won’t go into is details on how to migrate from Google Workspaces to Office 365, or how to migrate between Xero and Quickbooks. Why? Because the platform and the tools are there to accomplish a job. Without knowing what that job is, then we are just burning time and money swapping out parts that don’t matter.
First, let me start with a question:
What departments or organizations overlap and what do their processes look like?
Regardless of the company, all processes involve some kind of tech. There will be some high level process similarities (such as on-boarding new employees), but there will also be differences with how the specifics are done.
For the similarities, these are what we can optimize out early on, and more easily transfer data from the acquired company into. With luck, the processes should be fairly similar too, and that will reduce the time it takes to get on-boarded. These boulders we don’t need to worry too much about.
For the differences, this will be our focus as most of the work will be in “truing up” the differences in how they do things with what you do today. There could be some optimizations that you can bring to the company you acquired, but you may also discover some things they do that will improve your business.
We start at the department level because some of these processes will be specific to the department and it will be the first place to identify cross-department processes (such as the aforementioned employee on-boarding).
What I would do:
- Identify the various processes (approach to sales, employee on-boarding/off-boarding, expense reporting, etc.)
- Try to diagram this to provide a visual representation with each box highlighting a step in the process.
- For each of these boxes, do they have a specific tool or person involved (the process owner).
- Do any of these steps cross into a different department? If so, how and for what?
- This is where additional conversations and digging will be required. Especially since each department may not even know how they are linked.
- Stepping back, are there any tools involved when going between boxes? (think email, support ticket, or some other kind of automation)
Note that this is a general list, but for the HR, Finance, Ops teams, etc., this will apply to your area.
What we are trying to accomplish:
- Get a documented view of the ecosystem and how it would translate to your company.
- Identify the key point person and software that will need to come over or merge with your own tools.
- Identify the key activities that will need to be mapped to your company’s version of the same process and will be the focus of any changes.
The documentation and knowing who the process owners are will be invaluable as well as knowing how they function to see how best to translate it into your systems. From this initial information, many more questions start to open up that will allow you to break things down further. Why do it this way and use the specific software? Are there a special edge cases that we need to account for? How is the next person notified that they need to take action, and is there a reason why their approval is required instead of letting a request through?
As these questions get answered, you can start to build out a map of your software and theirs, key steps in their processes and yours, etc. This will become the guide towards bringing the processes over. Additionally, this will serve as the guide to know what data to bring over, and how.
After all if they are using Google Sheets and you’re using Excel, it is pretty much the same thing functionally. You (or one of your IT guys or AI) can throw together a script that can take their spreadsheet, massage it to your spreadsheet, and then copy/paste. You get more data and save money by not hiring consultants such as myself or much larger/more expensive firms to help out.
If you do need more help with this tech diligence to pull the data together and come up with a more detailed plan to flesh out what needs to happen (and to execute on it), then don’t hesitate to schedule a call.