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Tips and Answers to Your Questions
Integrating the New Organization
How is a project managed between two merged firms? How the authority and responsibility distributed? Who will have the control? And how is the projects planned?
If two or more organizations merge, they become one organization - with one Executive Director (ED), one board, and one management team. Part of the pre-merger negotiation process is deciding who will serve in these leadership roles, or at a minimum, who will be the ED and who will be on the board. The ED and board, with help from any designated management team or integration team, are responsible for integrating the merging organizations and establishing how decisions will be made in the merged organization. As soon as possible, you want to eliminate the "us and them" feeling, and get to a point where you are not thinking about how projects, power, and positions are allocated among people from the different pre-merger organizations.
From the wording of your question, however, it sounds like you may be talking about organizations that are not merged doing some sort of joint project together. In this case, the two (or more) organizations must sit down and negotiate how the joint project will work. There are many ways to allocate authority and responsibility in such a situation - it very much depends on what the project is, how it relates to the work of each of the organizations involved, what staff or resources will be coming from each organization, etc. A good first step is to have a meeting with the Executive Directors, any senior staff that might be working directly on the project, and perhaps one or more board members from each organization if the joint work is very central to the organization. Define what you want to do, and why. Talk about how it could be done, what is important to each organization, and what your concerns are. You can then begin working through the issues you mention. If discussions are difficult, it may help to bring in an outside party to facilitate.
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