IntegrationIQ

https://integrationiq.vercel.app/

This is one of my favourite projects that I’ve completed so far. I originally created this as a desktop app, but I converted it into a website for the purposes of uploading it to this portfolio. All too often when we talk about M&A deals we’re discussing the finances of the transaction, but this project is focused on what a merger/acquisition does to the people of the affected organizations. The question it helps us answer is basically: when one company buys another, what happens to the combined workforce, and where is the buyer going to feel it? I built it so that the user could easily pull up a quick, visual snapshot of what integrating two companies would actually do to their respective workforces.

The way it works is you fill in one standardized spreadsheet that describes both organizations department by department (the standardized sheet can be downloaded by clicking on the “Download blank template” button). For each department you give it the basics like headcount, number of managers, how many critical roles exist, average salary, plus a few judgment calls scored out of 100, like how unique a team’s skills are. The model then matches each department across the two firms, so the acquirer’s finance team gets lined up against the target’s finance team, and then the program works out how much of the work overlaps. From there it estimates how many roles could realistically be consolidated, how many people are likely to leave the organization once the disruption that most M&A deals cause begins to take hold, and what all of that costs once you add up items like severance, recruitment and retraining.

One of the parts that I dedicated a lot of time on was retention risk, which is essentially the risk that existing employees walk once the deal is announced/once integration begins. Instead of just treating every department the same, the model looks at each one based on factors like its turnover history, how concentrated its critical roles are, and how replaceable those people are so that a risk score can be assigned to each department (low, moderate, high, and critical). It runs the same type of scoring process to determine how complex each department will be to integrate. The program also models a targeted retention spend and tells you whether the departures it prevents are worth more than the bonuses it costs to retain.

The final output is a (in my opinion) beautiful report instead of a traditional excel visual. One of my favourite parts about the report is the “Integration Priorities” section: essentially every department gets plotted by how complex it is to integrate against how much retention risk it carries, with the size of each bubble tracking the combined headcount, so at a glance you can see which functions need executive attention right away and which ones can wait. Other core features include the overlap between roles, the expected number of departures, a full cost breakdown, and a ranked list of where to focus first.