Corporate mergers and acquisitions (M&A) professionals — whether they work at banks, in corporate development groups, or integration teams — often complain that their industry is falling behind in modern process solutions. While M&A is becoming an increasingly accepted first-line growth strategy for companies around the world, and deal volume continue to set jaw-dropping new records quarter to quarter, the M&A industry itself has not adopted new innovations in technology or techniques since the late 1990s.
It’s time to bring M&A into the 21st century.
The Agile M&A Practitioner’s Guide lays forth a new vision for completing M&A initiatives in the information age: the Agile M&A Process Model. Created by industry veteran Kison Patel, the Agile M&A Process Model advocates applying the “Agile” project management style first popularized in silicon valley to the M&A industry.
The Agile approach to project management was originally developed to address workflow inefficiencies in the software development industry. This approach is based around universally applicable operational values such as speed, flexibility, cross-functional transparency, and teamwork — values that are perfectly suited to highly dynamic, informationally complex undertakings like M&A.
As a project management style, Agile has proven to be uniquely suited to the modern globalized business landscape, which is defined by its unpredictability, instantaneous communication, and focus on rapid growth and innovation. The success of the Agile approach has led to its adoption throughout a variety of industries.
In this book you will learn:
- The complete history of Agile and its advantages over traditional, programmatic approaches to project management.
- How large tech firms like Google and Atlassian are already applying Agile techniques to their internal M&A functions.
- How to apply Agile strategies over the course of the entire M&A lifecycle — from the earliest stages of analyzing potential targets through the end of post-merger integration.
- How to adapt established Agile techniques like the daily standup, priority backlog, and team retrospectives to help support the M&A project.
- How to use change management techniques to help your company transition to an Agile project management style.
