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Tips and Answers
to Your Questions
Integrating the New Organization
Jump-Starting an Integration Plan
The purpose of an integration plan is simply to help you organize
the work required in the many important integration areas into a comprehensive
plan, with responsibilities, expectations, and time lines clearly spelled
out. The plan you create will be a living, changing document, but it
will also serve as a touchstone for all future integration activity.
This chapter suggests two possible processes for getting started on
the plan, and then offers a tool to assist you.
There are two basic approaches to creating the initial version
of your integration plan. You can use a small group—usually the
integration team—or you can use the entire staff (or, minimally,
a large group of staff leaders). We’ll examine both approaches
here.
The integration team as driver for the plan
Some organizations choose to have the integration team develop the
integration plan. The team involves lead staff from all departments
in setting key outcomes and creating an action plan.
This approach typically takes several weeks, assuming two to four
meetings of three or four hours each over the course of that time.
We recommend that you commit to an intensive work schedule to get the
plan done within a few weeks, so you don’t dilute momentum.
It is easier to coordinate the schedules of the limited number of
people on the integration team. If the team includes good planners
and big-picture thinkers who can clearly see (and articulate) where
the merged organization is heading and what needs to be done to get
there, it can rapidly set out an action plan. After creating a draft
of the plan, the team gains department-head approval of the time frame
and action steps, since department heads know best what their staffs
can accomplish.
Speed and ease are clear benefits of this approach, but there are
several potential drawbacks. It depends largely on the makeup of the
integration team; the wrong mix can hinder good planning. The approach
also reduces staff involvement and buy-in. Instead, a team creates
the plan, the department heads modify and approve it, and then staff
must commit to their respective roles in the process.
The staff-wide planning approach (one version of which is described
next) can overcome these drawbacks.
Staff as driver for the integration plan
Some organizations hold a one- or two-day staff retreat to jump-start
integration planning. This is a great way to get the entire staff (or
staff leadership, depending on the size of the organization) to work
together toward a new future for the merged organization. It can be
very effective in building a sense of teamwork throughout the newly
merged organization, while at the same time accomplishing a key planning
activity with everyone’s buy-in more assured. Because the staff
drafted the plan and the timeline, they can feel confident that the
tasks and deadlines are achievable. They will have built a sense of
commitment to and ownership of the plan. The staff-retreat approach
has drawbacks as well: retreats are difficult to coordinate, they can
be costly (in budget and lost work time), and they can be cumbersome.
The product that comes out of such a retreat won’t be a “final” plan,
but it should be as comprehensive as possible. Like a plan jump-started
by an integration team, it will need to be reviewed and approved by
the various department heads, and it should always be viewed as a “work
in progress.” Integration never goes exactly as planned, and
you always need to be ready and able to modify tasks, dates, and even
team assignments as circumstances change. In this approach, once the
plan has been approved, an integration team could assume responsibility
for managing it.
Developing the Content
Regardless of who creates the initial plan, it must contain certain
types of information:
- Desired Outcomes : What are you hoping to achieve within
each integration area? What does successful integration look like?
- Activities : What activities need to be accomplished
to get you from where you are to where you want to be?
- Lead Person : Who has primary responsibility for making
sure each activity is accomplished?
- Team : Who else will work on that activity?
- Start Date and Target Date : When does work on that activity
need to start, and—if it is not an ongoing requirement—by
what date does it need to be completed?
Exactly how the planning group answers these questions can
vary. We recommend doing the initial work in a room with a lot of wall
space. Post large sheets of paper on those walls to represent a twelve-
to eighteen-month timeline. List the months horizontally along the
top of your charts, and the activities vertically. As you add activities,
ask yourself: is everything in the right order? That is, if A has to
happen before B, is A scheduled to happen before B? Your goal
is to organize activities so that they all happen at the right time
relative to each other.
One key to developing a useful integration plan is not getting bogged
down in details. Those responsible for each activity will lay out the
specific tasks to be accomplished. In this level of planning, you want
to get the big-picture “must do’s” out on the table
and organized into the same plan.
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