Setting up an integration office is not the problem. The problem arises around day thirty, when the list of open items has grown larger than the list of completed items, and no one knows exactly who makes which decision anymore. The office still exists on paper, but it does not monitor itself.
On paper, an integration office monitors three things: which synergies are actually being realized, which dependencies are holding back the rest of the process, and which decisions still need to be made. In practice, it often gets bogged down in a collection of status overviews that no one keeps up anymore, because keeping it up is a task that does not specifically belong to anyone.
That is not a matter of discipline. It is a matter of structure. A list that does not indicate which dependencies are blocking the rest and who is monitoring that naturally becomes an archive rather than a steering tool. Anyone who wants to keep the office workable must establish in advance who monitors which type of decision, rather than only once confusion arises.
Not every decision carries equal weight, and not every decision has to fall in the same week. An integration office that tackles everything simultaneously drowns in items that are individually small but become unmanageable together. So the question is not only which decisions belong in the first hundred days — that is described at which decisions are relevant in the first hundred days — but also in what order they are addressed.
One way to determine that order is not urgency or budget, but the cost of uncertainty: what it costs if a decision remains unresolved, expressed in what goes wrong in the meantime. Some decisions can wait without causing damage. Other decisions become more costly to postpone every week, because people fill in for themselves what has not yet been decided. How you can sort decisions by this cost of uncertainty is explained on the page about sorting decisions by cost of uncertainty. An integration office that does not make this order explicit ends up monitoring at random: whatever makes the most noise gets attention, and whatever stays quiet is left until it becomes a problem.
The reason an unworkable integration office does not resolve itself is that waiting is not neutral. While decisions remain pending, key people stay uncertain about their role, their team, their future within the new combination. Who these key people are and what happens if no one actively informs them is described at who your key people are after an acquisition. Uncertainty is not a waiting room in which nothing happens — it is a period in which people draw their own conclusions, and not always the conclusion you would want. Why departures increase specifically during those unclear months is explained on the page about departures during the unclear months.
And what if the hundred days have passed and the plan has not been achieved? That is not an edge case but a real scenario, and the question of who signals that and what happens next is a standard part of a workable integration office. See what to do if Day 100 is not achieved.
It is important to be clear here about what mergerintegration.net is and is not. This is not a party that has carried out integration processes and sells an approach based on that experience. There is no track record to point to, and one would not fit here anyway. What there is: three generators — for the synergy baseline, the Day 1 plan and the Day 100 plan — and an integration office as a working structure, with benefit tracking, a dependency overview, and a decision list that records what is and is not to be integrated.
That last point is not a side issue. Every part of an integration should be accompanied by the question of whether it should be combined at all, and that question is not an exception reserved for doubtful cases — it is a standard step. Integration can add value, but it can just as easily destroy value, and a workable integration office is an instrument that keeps asking that question, not an instrument that assumes integration as a given.
The tool is under construction. Anyone who wants to use it now can sign up for the waiting list; nothing is being offered that does not yet work.
An integration office that remains workable ultimately runs on capacity: who has time to monitor decisions, keep track of dependencies, and update the status of synergies. Before you allocate that capacity, it is useful to know what part of that monitoring work consists of repeatable tasks that can be transferred. The work scan from FTE TO AI calculates, per task, what part of the work can be taken over by AI, giving a concrete picture of where people remain necessary and where systems take over.
Vraag maar wat er op Day 1 moet staan, of wat integreren juist kapotmaakt.
Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.