Two companies, two systems, one deadline.
The deal team has moved on and the integration is now somebody's second job. Meanwhile two directories both think they are authoritative, two sets of contracts are both under term, and the target's IT lead has no reporting line and a résumé that is suddenly current. The decisions made in the first ninety days are the ones the combined company lives inside for the next three years, and almost all of them get made by default.
The visible problem is rarely the one that decides how this goes. These are the parts that are true whether or not anybody has said them out loud.
Each company's directory, finance system and asset register is right about its own half and blind to the other. Until one is named the survivor, every report about the combined business is an estimate.
Two endpoint tools, two backup platforms, two MSPs, each with its own notice period. The overlap is real money and the notice dates are the constraint nobody has looked up.
The person who knows how the acquired estate actually works is watching an org chart get drawn without them on it. That knowledge has a shelf life measured in months.
Getting the new team into email fast is the visible task. Who can reach what, in which company, is the one that turns up in an audit two years later.
Both estates keep running, integration goes on a list, and the list moves behind whatever is on fire. Two years on the company is still paying twice and reporting from two places, and the parallel period has quietly become the operating model.
Name the surviving systems in the first month, while nobody is invested and the answer is still a decision rather than a concession. Everything after that is scheduling, and scheduling is a solvable problem.
The order matters more than the individual steps. Most of the cost in these situations comes from doing the right things in the wrong sequence.
Not two inventories: one, with a column saying which company each thing came from. The disagreements are the integration plan.
Directory, finance, email, endpoint management, backup. Five decisions that determine most of the rest, taken deliberately rather than by whichever team documents theirs first.
Ordered by notice date and dependency, not by which is easiest. A cancellation missed by a week is a year of duplicate cost.
Integration without a named owner becomes everybody's second priority. The plan is short, public, and has dates that move only on purpose.
Each of these has a real answer and a plausible one. Knowing which you are giving is most of the job.
Which directory is the surviving one, and who decided?
What are we now paying for twice, and when can each contract be exited?
Who owns the acquired company's vendor relationships now?
If the target's IT lead resigned tomorrow, what would we lose?
