Helping post-merger integration move from strategy to shared action
A shared operating system for client leaders and their consultancy to turn a six-month integration ambition into owned work, visible progress and coordinated action, across 50–200 people.
The situation
A merger has taken place, and the business leaders have selected a consultancy to deliver a post-merger integration involving around 50–200 people.
Senior leaders are aligned on the ambition: integrate the businesses within six months, while protecting business continuity and creating the conditions for sustainable growth.
The challenge: Turning that ambition into coordinated work across the organisation, while keeping people connected to the purpose and to one another as the change takes shape.
How Stellafai could help
Our operating system embeds transparency, accountability and collaboration into the client’s culture and integration project. Everyone in the client’s space can see the information it contains, giving teams a shared view of context, updates and blockers.
Successful OKRs require input from the people closest to the work, automatically bringing delivery teams into the integration planning. The consultancy (or Stellafai coaches) would facilitate these discussions, helping client leaders and delivery teams contribute their ideas. Stellafai then digitises discussions whilst providing a shared space to document, store and update the OKRs.
Each Outcome team's, Objectives and Key Results has an owner: they are responsible for delivering the work, updating the system and providing context. This builds accountability and helps capture organisational knowledge.
Stellafai’s Star Chart visualises progress, helping reveal blockers and successes. This enables leaders and consultants to intervene quickly to keep the integration on track, while recognising and sharing good work so it can be replicated. The Star Chart also helps teams connect their work to other teams’ outcomes, supporting collaboration and the dissemination of 'best practice' before the integration is even complete.
Stellafai’s Resource Library gives the consultancy an accessible space to store its integration frameworks, playbooks, templates and methods. These resources can be made available to clients and to the OKR Builder, Checker and Accelerator tools. These tools then use this material to review OKRs, recommend improvements or interventions informed by the consultancy’s expertise, helping maintain the integrations momentum.
Integration challenges and responses
| Challenge | Response |
|---|---|
| The strategic vision is clear to leaders but not connected to everyone’s day-to-day work. | Involve workstream teams in shaping OKRs, then connect their priorities and progress to the shared integration outcomes. |
| Workstreams operate in silos, making dependencies and blockers difficult to spot. | Give teams and leaders a shared view of ownership, progress and issues that need cross-team attention. |
| The consultancy’s frameworks and the business’s knowledge are hard to find or become separated from delivery. | Make documented methods, playbooks and relevant knowledge available alongside the outcomes and work they inform. |
| People from the original businesses may feel change is happening to them, weakening trust, engagement or their desire to stay. | Give people a meaningful role in defining the outcomes, make contributions visible, and create space to raise concerns and learn as the integration progresses. This may help preserve knowledge and support retention. |
| The integration timeline is at risk, or changes disrupt customers and business-as-usual. | Make progress and emerging risks visible early on, so the consultancy and client leaders can respond while protecting continuity, momentum and the integration deadline. |
| Teams report completed activity without showing whether the intended value is emerging. | Keep updates connected to agreed key results, helping the team review outcomes as well as activity and adjust their approach when needed. |
Potential value
PwC’s 2026 M&A Integration Survey found that only one in three acquirers fully achieved all their prioritised deal-thesis objectives.
Only 46% said value drivers had been translated into initiatives with clear owners, timelines and dependencies before integration.
These findings point to a gap between strategic ambition and coordinated execution.
By recording consultancy-facilitated OKR discussions in one shared space, Stellafai could help the consultancy:
- Turn six-month ambitions into owned work: connect integration outcomes to workstream OKRs, named owners and measures.
- See where support is needed early: use updates and the Star Chart to make progress, blockers and dependencies visible, helping leaders decide where to intervene before delays occur.
- Keep knowledge accessible: make the consultancy’s frameworks and methods available alongside the work, so teams can refer to and reuse them when they need to.
- Assess progress and value: track measures such as milestones achieved, time to resolve blockers, time spent gathering status updates, continuity of customer or business services, and retention of critical roles or knowledge.
Fit and boundaries
The consultancy leads the integration work: it brings its expertise and frameworks, facilitates discussions, and helps the client decide what action to take.
Or
The consultancy can manage the client account and outsource the OKR facilitation to Stellafai’s coaches, who specialise in Event Storming.
Client leaders own the integration ambition, decisions, priorities and resources.
Workstream teams contribute their knowledge, shape their OKRs and keep progress updated.
Stellafai provides the shared space to document discussions, store and apply the consultancy’s frameworks, and make OKRs, ownership, updates and blockers visible. Its OKR tools can help review and strengthen OKRs using the material the consultancy provides; the consultancy and the client remain responsible for reviewing recommendations and deciding what to do.
Stellafai supports the consultancy’s approach. It does not replace the consultancy’s facilitation, client governance or leadership decisions, or finance validation of realised value.
Evidence note: PwC’s survey covered 530 senior executives and dealmakers at organisations with annual revenue of $1 billion or more. Treat the figures as directional context, not a benchmark for a 50–200-person integration team; the findings are based on self-reported outcomes.