In one of the networking events on effective agile
transformation that I facilitated, one of the learners asked a question about
how agile did not measure well in an organization that the learner’s
organization acquired. The learner reasoned that the acquired company was a
smaller organization that claimed financial profit in a niche market but has
been bleeding after acquisition when adopting agile. While the specifics of the
details have to be left out in this blog, the discussion made me realize some of
the pitfalls in agile adoption in mergers & acquisition prior to shifting
responsibility of failure on agile practices.
This quest for executing mergers & acquisitions
(M&A) successfully led me to pursue several articles and books which made me
feel that “Execution” itself should be “strategically” thought through by
leaders within an organization and particularly with M&A. Paul Burmeister, who has executed in the
capacity of COO and CFO in many industries, quotes multiple ideas to ensure
that the M&A activity becomes successful, emphasizing critical importance of
the leaders’ synergy from both the organizations to establish success factors
to measure the efficiency of integration.
Among these stands out an important point on whether the
M&A focuses on products, processes, and intellectual capital (Dahl, 2012). While
M&A accelerates the acquiring organization’s competitive advantage by
leveraging the new product line or the intellectual capital that leads to
quicker access to additional markets horizontally or vertically, the reference
to processes differentiated how clash of various processes (waterfall versus
agile) may have to carefully weighed.
I think here is where organizational leaders may be failing
to adopt asking “what would have to be true for the” execution to continue to be a fantastic choice? (Lafley & Martin, 2013, p. 204) If leaders failed to
understand the twelve principles behind agile and scale them appropriately,
then, they have created an organizational impediment for agile to fail their
organizational success. Rationalizing on how the acquired company has always
functioned differently and seeing no need to change fails to take advantage of
the additional capabilities that come with the acquisition, reasons Jeff Sutherland,
one of the contributors to the Agile Manifesto, who attributed the organization’s
failure to remove impediments for Agile to fail (Larman & Vodde, 2011).
Once we come to terms that we have to review the processes
in place, there are a couple of additional areas to look at for successful
integration of agile in M&A. These include identification of proper product
owners and tools for interaction. Unleashing properly spaced-out adoption of
skilled people to work as product owners that understand the agile principles
of establishing a good risk adjusted product and sprint backlog, prioritizing
the backlog to build trust and maintaining a cadence balancing team’s commitment
in distributed and virtual teams that have to be embraced, and recalibrating on
the tools of communication is vital. Charlie Rudd, CEO of SolutionsIQ,
underscores how organizations fail to implement agile without building the
product owner capability (2013, para 5). Firms should give importance to training
in such a way that time is made for people to get trained, says Larman &
Vodde (2011, para 4).
Given these observations, what other execution specific
strategies should one consider for agile to succeed with M&A activities?
Should there be a standardized M&A integration checklist put together for
agile success and if so, what are some pointers to definitely consider? Please
share your thoughts.
References
Dahl, D. (2012). 7 steps to a successful company merger or
acquisition. Retrieved Oct 10, 2013, from, https://www.openforum.com/articles/7-steps-to-a-successful-ma-a-small-business-guide/
Larman, C. & Vodde, B. (2011, February 9). Top ten
organizational impediments. Retrieved Oct 11, 2013, from http://scrumedge.blogspot.com/2011/02/top-ten-organizational-impediments.html
