Unclear roles. Siloed workstreams. Manual tracking.
Following a reduction in team size, IBM's Mergers & Acquisitions department faced uncertainty around roles, responsibilities, and workflows. Teams were working across multiple workstreams with no shared understanding of how the end-to-end process actually operated, and several activities relied on manual tracking and communication. Supporting the M&A Director as a Service Designer, I helped map the full M&A journey for the first time, identify the operational pain points, and facilitate workshops to redesign the department's future workflow.
Roles were unclear and workstreams were siloed, with no shared view of how the department's end-to-end process actually worked.
Through interviews and collaborative sessions with team members, I mapped the current M&A experience end to end and identified the key pain points across the department for the first time.
🎯 The challenge: align multiple workstreams around a shared process while simplifying workflows and enabling better collaboration.
Three principles drove the redesign: clarify ownership across workstreams, improve visibility and collaboration between teams, and simplify processes wherever manual tracking could be reduced or automated.
I facilitated three workshops, each with a distinct goal, to move the department from mapping the problem to designing its future state:
I facilitated the workshop that established a new Integration Program Manager role, aimed at accelerating progress and removing blockers across workstreams.
I guided the team in outlining the key engagement points for the new Integration Program Manager role, so ownership was clear in practice, not just on paper.
I led the session on tools and procedures, which identified Jira as a potential unified platform for tracking project progress, replacing scattered manual updates.
Together, these workshops let teams collaborate to clarify roles, identify process improvements, and design a consolidated future-state "To Be" journey — now ready to share with teams for feedback before presenting to stakeholders.
What changed for the department: clearer team responsibilities, improved collaboration across workstreams, reduced process complexity, and better visibility of project progress.
🎯 This project helped the M&A department align on a shared operating model and establish a clearer, more efficient way of working after the team restructuring.
Three things I'd carry into the next project, learned directly from this one.
Not just software.
The map itself became a tool the department kept using.
The Integration Program Manager role came out of the room, not from a slide I presented.