Increasing the Speed of M&A Integration

In over a decade of delivering successful M&A Integration services, we’ve worked aggressively to speed up the integration or transition process after a deal closes. Often, this involves taking appropriate shortcuts with traditional project management, requirements gathering and implementation methodologies.

What shortcuts from your personal M&A history have been most helpful?

A few, off the top of my head, for starters:

• Limiting the requirements gathering scope to high risk processes
• Flattening the project team structure to smaller, more highly and broadly skilled teams
• Making the project plan the driving tool for regular status meetings, without supporting word meeting notes

Open Source Development: Top 5 Things I’ve Always Wanted to Know

I am primarily familiar with Microsoft products and languages, but am interested in learning more about open source.  To summarize, here are the top 5 things I’ve always wanted to know about open source development:

1.  Who do you talk to when you have a support issue regarding an open source product that you’re using?

2.  Are open source programs as secure as proprietary programs and are open source solutions embraced by large corporations even though they don’t have a name like Oracle, Microsoft etc. behind them for support?

3.  What are the most popular open source programs out there?

4.  What’s the best place on the web to learn about the open source solutions out there today?

5.  Are there any known drawbacks to open source versus proprietary software that people should know about before pursuing it just on a cost basis?

Granted, some of these I know the partial answers to, but as someone who doesn’t use open source very readily except for Log4Net, it’s fairly representative of the questions I’d have about open source technologies.