Blob maps / Use cases / Post-merger integration
Post-merger integration
Combine two organisations with full clarity about what each team actually does — and where the overlaps and gaps sit.
The problem
Mergers and acquisitions are announced with high confidence and executed in partial darkness. Leaders know the financials, the org charts, and the stated capabilities. What they rarely know is what each organisation actually does day-to-day — which activities, outputs, and systems are genuinely duplicated, which are complementary, and which critical functions exist in one business but not the other. Integration decisions made without this clarity produce redundancy in unexpected places, gaps in expected ones, and months of painful discovery that should have happened before the ink dried.
How BlobMap helps
- 1Run parallel BlobMap insights across both organisations — before or immediately after close — to create comparable, structured pictures of both workforces.
- 2The consistent classification framework (blob types, time states, size, frequency) makes comparison meaningful. Like-for-like analysis becomes possible.
- 3Leaders can identify genuine functional overlaps — work that both organisations are doing — and distinguish those from apparent overlaps that mask important differences in scope or quality.
- 4The relationship layer surfaces the invisible dependencies within each organisation: the informal flows of work that integration plans regularly break.
How a typical engagement runs
Run insights on both organisations
Set up separate BlobMap insights for each entity. Use the same structure so the outputs are comparable.
Map independently
Let contributors from each organisation map their own work without seeing the other's output. Independent mapping produces more honest pictures.
Compare the outputs
Review both maps side-by-side. Where does work cluster similarly? Where are there structural gaps in one that the other fills? Where are there genuine duplicates?
Map the dependencies
For each organisation, use the relationship layer to understand what depends on what. Flag dependencies that the integration plan might inadvertently break.
Design the integration
Use the structured data to inform integration sequencing, team consolidation, and role definition — with evidence rather than assumption.
The outcome
A structured, comparable view of what both organisations actually do — enabling integration decisions that are grounded in operational reality rather than organisational aspiration.