6 Benefits of Implementing an Agile M&A Method
Overview
- Efficiency
- Agility
- Data Insights
- Governance
- Innovation
- Culture Shift
Agile M&A practices transform M&A into a simplified, efficient set of processes.
Once a business adapts Agile M&A practices, the company can transform into an agile, data-driven enterprise without sacrificing quality or taking on additional risk.
The following are 6 benefits of adopting Agile M&A processes
1. Efficiency
Through the elimination of wasteful elements, efficiencies are created, improving the process.
Examples of wasteful elements Agile eliminates
- duplicate work
- task switching
- unclear communication
- unused employee knowledge
With the elimination of waste comes a solid understanding of customer value, as an Agile organization focuses and streamlines all of its processes to increase customer value continuously.
Increasing efficiency allows a company to focus extra time and effort into engaging in high-value business development activities that can bring in revenue or new business.
This helps with everyone’s unified goal in M&A, closing the deal faster.
2. Agility
Agile project management is essentially an iterative process that focuses on customer needs first, team interaction over tasks and adapts to the current project state instead of following an inflexible plan.
The project plan becomes an adaptable, flexible plan that changes in response to how the team is working and priorities may shift in response to what is happening.
The organization can become more agile through the use of reusable components, highly automated processes and self-service delivery models.
This not only keeps team members responsible, but also there are no surprises or delays, as teams communicate daily regarding both the status of the project as well as issues that arise.
3. Data Insights
Data becomes a significant asset as the quality and reliability of data is improved.
Using meaningful analytics will help teams continuously improve the M&A process.
The team must reflect on the conclusions that the data analytics present and openly discuss ways to improve the M&A process.
Also, risk can be managed by using analytics to track identified risks within the deal.
4. Governance
Data and metrics are employed to measure and improve governance.
A solid governance structure is the foundation to a successful M&A execution.
Knowing who is managing tasks for each team is important; also, the manager of the team will establish the priority level for each task list.
Although employee responsibility and accountability are the crux of the successful implementation of Agile methodology, the employees need to have a manager who is responsible for creating task lists, delegating responsibility and prioritizing the tasks on each list.
5. Innovation
Continuous innovation is applied to all processes.
By consistently evaluating processes, both daily, as well as at the end of any project, areas that can be improved are noticed in real time.
This provides an opportunity to not only address an issue in real time, but to also learn from the issue and possibly improve a process along the way, which can be implemented in the next project as well.
This constant evaluation and testing of new approaches leads to a continuous cycle of improvement and innovation.
6. Culture shift
Staff is engaged and morale is improve through continuous bottom-up improvements.
Through Agile, employees are expected to be accountable for their work, as they are responsible for daily updates to their progress and proactively addressing any issues that may occur.
In addition, employees are expected to collaborate and communicate more, in an environment where everyone is a valued member of the team, trying to complete tasks individually to meet a goal as a team.
This creates a culture shift in support of employee accountability, independence and overall satisfaction.
This blog is part 6 in our Agile M&A 101 blog series.
You can check out part 5, 9 M&A Waste Elements that Agile Eliminates.
Originally published at dealroom.net.
