Are Test Teams Prepared to Handle Mergers and Acquisitions?

Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) have become a norm of business. The volume of M&A fluctuates based on market and economy trends, but there is no denying that M&A will continue to fuel new business opportunities, ideate unexplored product and service avenues, and penetrate into untouched markets.

It is not uncommon to see multiple acquisitions across domains in a short period of time. While this may be necessary to stay competitive and relevant in the market, there are core challenges that should be handled internally to make M&A successful, especially from an IT angle.

There are several useful resources to guide testers through a merger or acquisition, but let’s look at the strategic pieces rather than mere implementation and tactical guides. These will empower the testing discipline to embrace a merger or acquisition effectively from technology, people, and process angles, with IT playing a key role in driving a merger and acquisition’s success.

Alignment with current product lines: M&A are typically driven by the executive team, supported by a set of stakeholders, and a M&A firm to determine whether the deal will be a success from varied angles (such as legal, technical, and business). It is important that the team includes an executive from the quality/testing discipline, such as a vice president or director of quality, to ensure the relevance of the deal and alignment of product lines from a quality (and ultimately an end user) angle. Agreed, there is a lot of confidentiality in the M&A process, but this visibility and representation is critical, given that the testing discipline is the internal voice of the end user community.

Integration feasibility: While it is not possible to drill into the integration aspects of various product lines upfront, at least the feasibility has to be explored from technology and quality angles to gauge alignment, inherent challenges, and mitigation strategies. While the M&A consultant will provide guidance along these lines, there has to be adequate representation from the quality discipline in confirming feasibility through initial tests. This will go a long way in the post-migration integration, as seen in major acquisitions such as Microsoft-Skype.

Migration costs: Testing tools, technologies, and processes need to be evaluated to determine alignment. In some cases migration might not be possible, and the organization might choose to continue their independent routes even after the M&A. While this is not the ideal scenario, accepting it upfront will save unwanted resources spent on migration implementation.

Start early and stay connected: Testing is a unique discipline within the product team in that it has touch points with every other discipline including development, business, marketing, design, operations, build, etc. Staying connected early on with cross-teams establishes the right rapport among people. Testing staff need to leverage such a unique role, take the driver’s seat, and lead by example in building a collaborative team from the merger or acquisition.

Have you had to work through a merger or acquisition? What was your experience like?