Most migrations have a clear source and a clear destination. You know what’s moving and where it’s going.

M&A migrations don’t work that way.

When two organizations combine, neither environment was built to become part of the other. Different naming conventions, different identity structures, different admin practices that accumulated over years — and now everything has to align under a timeline set by the deal, not by IT.

On one acquisition, the complexity wasn’t in the technical execution. It was in reconciling two Active Directory forests with overlapping structures and naming conflicts nobody caught until we were already mid-project. We worked through it. But finding it that late cost time nobody had budgeted for.

The lesson was straightforward: M&A migrations need more discovery time, not less — because you’re starting with two environments that were never designed to connect and were never documented with the other one in mind.

The deal closes on a date. The integration finishes when it’s actually done.

What’s the thing that’s caught you off guard in an M&A migration that wouldn’t have been an issue in a standard project?

#Migration #MergersAndAcquisitions #IT