Agile M&A

Accelerating your integration often comes down to early planning, process management, and the tool, or tools, used to make your process management more effective.

Agile project management methodologies are more often embraced by the IT and manufacturing sectors than by Corporate Development teams. Further helping Agile’s cause in these disciplines is that their own products are developed in an Agile-like manner. This does not mean, however, that Agile’s principles cannot be applied to Corporate Development and the world of M&A and its stakeholders.

Culture plays a critical role in deal speed and Agile methodologies can help. Moving away from a predetermined plan or chain of events and becoming more flexible, adaptive to change, and small-task oriented will help all stakeholders navigate the waters of M&A more effectively, saving both time and energy...and ultimately, money.

Our objective is to provide small, practical steps that can help executives as they work to introduce Agile into the workplace and disrupt the common Waterfall approach.

In any deal, whether buy-side or sell-side, or if it involves an investment bank, private equity firm, or corporate development business, there are a lot of necessary steps to take. There are many hands involved, confidential information shared, and hard decisions to make.

The process of due diligence is often classified as chaotic, stressful, and fast-paced and, historically, nothing drastic has been done to disrupt the way this procedure is approached. We now know, however, Agile methodologies for M&A practitioners have proven to improve diligence speed and quality.

It is predicted that in the next year we will see not only an increase in mergers and acquisitions, but also an increase in the size of these business deals. With more and larger deals taking place, organizations are becoming necessarily smarter about how to navigate the process of M&A.

Typically when you hire an investment bank your looking at their track record, industry expertise, relationships with buyers, maybe even a culture fit. The following distinguish the difference between just good and great investment banks.

DealRoom vs. FirmRoom: Which platform is right for your business? At Day 1, we’ve launched a new stand-alone, enterprise-grade data room based on our successful project management platform, DealRoom. Both tools provide businesses with a centralized, secure, and transparent work location that can help them become more productive, methodical, and efficient.

M&A deals can overwhelm buyers & sellers, burying them in an avalanche of paper, repeat requests, & wait-time. However, with efficiency & effectiveness at its core, DealRoom provides a smarter approach to the complex practice of M&A.

There are 100s of documents to upload to a data room, a tracker to update with what’s been added, emails, follow-up emails, more uploads, updating a tracker again ect. The solution to this is to automate the workflow so management teams spend far less time answering requests and stay focused on running their business.

Agile M&A practices transform M&A into a simplified, efficient set of processes. Once a business adapts Agile M&A practices, the company can transform into an agile, data-driven enterprise without sacrificing quality or taking on additional risk.

Are you an “old school” M&A practitioner? Being “old school” means that maybe you are holding on to traditional practices, because they work for you. These methods are tried and true, and have been proven over the years. However, there are many new ways in which to approach the M&A process.

Agile M&A promises to identify and eliminate waste that otherwise contributes to poor customer service, lost business, higher business costs and lost employee productivity.

Typical project management tools are not efficient.

Agile M&A is a management system derived from Agile software development and Lean manufacturing

Agile seems to be a corporate buzzword.