Let us have a look at the situation for mergers in most companies. How are people working esp. in merger integration prepared for sucess?
Which people work in post merger integration?
An acquirer has a large project team for post-merger integration and so does the target. How do you make sure that all members of the integration team have sufficient knowledge to perform best? The answer is that all project members, not only the managers and project managers, need background knowledge on merger integration as well as lessons learned and best practices from other merger integration projects
What information is needed?
You need to expand the experience horizon of all involved managers into the realm of merger integration specific topics and decisions. According to Kahneman, what-you-see-is-all-there-is might be a problem, which means that people only can cope with situations that are within their horizon. So you have to expand it with content about merger integration theory but also about situations and pragmatics of merger integration.
How to make training work
Many mergers are cross-border mergers with many people in many countries involved. So due to geographic diversity, timezones etc. onsite training does not make sense. Go online.
The solution
Therefore, a group of seasoned merger integration managers created an online training called PMI2go that provides that knowledge as well as experiences and lessons learned from over 250 successful merger integration projects. The solution is an on demand, online training with just the right mix of theory and hands-on situations explaining how to successfully integrate companies. Together with SAP, Bertelsmann, Qiagen and Stada we created an online training for merger integration that fits multiple different industries and is targeted to managers acting in a merger integration situation.
The training has content for managers and project members and covers in detail topics like HR integration, Finance integration, Production integration and Research and Development integration. Find more information here: http://mergerintegration.eu/mergerintegrationtraining.html