Page 58 - Straight Talk On Project Management IV

The Urge To Merge: What A Time To Be In IT Project Management!

Happy New Year!

One recurring business trend of recent years looks set
to continue into 2020 – and it’s great news for those of
us working in IT Project Management - mergers and
acquisitions! As Tara Lachapelle, writing for Bloomberg
says, “We’re in an absolutely bonkers five-year run of
corporate coupling that shows no sign of stopping.”

In fact, in 2019, about $2.7 trillion of deals were struck
globally, it would be hard to imagine any of them
happening without effective IT Project Management
capabilities.

Every merger is an it project

To illustrate this, let me take you back to “Merger
Monday” (Monday 25th November 2019).
Two of the headline deals from a pretty dramatic day ... Viagogo to purchase StubHub from eBay for
$4 billion … LVMH (which also owns brands like Christian Dior, Louis Vuitton, and Hennessy) to buy
Tiffany & Co for $16.2 billion.

These two stories demonstrate the increasing value and importance of the work of IT Project teams.

It is the business – it project management is the key to mergers

Viagogo to purchase StubHub, LVMH to buy Tiffany & Co. are especially interesting from an IT
Project perspective - Why?

Imagine if these buyouts had happened, say twenty years ago, and you’d been asked to point to the
“IT-est” of these two mergers, it would have been a no-brainer! Viagogo, StubHub, eBay … the
participants alone single this out as a ‘tech deal’, however, over the last two decades, the rate of
digitalisation across all sectors now makes pretty much every deal a ‘tech deal’. As I always say, IT no
longer merely supports a business; IT IS the business.

So, on the face of it, the firm that make those expensive brown Louis Vuitton handbags has bought
the firm that makes expensive diamond and sterling silver jewellery, and twenty years ago that
would have been it.

In reality though, in 2019, what has happened is that a company whose business is run by an
efficient but complex IT system has bought another company, with a business run by a different,
efficient but equally complex IT system. It’s someone’s job to marry these IT systems and that
someone is us!

A PM friend Mal puts it like this, “I remember when I first started out on my career path, a company
merger happened, and the IT Project team was tasked with upgrading the printers at the acquired
business from dot matrix to inkjet. That was it! These days IT Project teams deal with spaghetti nests
of systems and software to ensure the new larger entity can function. We are the lifeblood of a
merger or company take-over.”