Checklists are a fundamental part of professionally managed M&A projects. Whereas in the past checklists were mostly used in classical paper, Word or Excel format, digitalization offers new opportunities to use these lists more efficiently and effectively and thus increase the quality of collaboration.
M&A is often referred to as the supreme discipline of business administration, a fact that indicates how complex these projects are and how high the entrepreneurial risks they involve. To manage the complexity and high risk, there are efforts to further standardize M&A projects and give them as much structure as possible.
Science has developed a variety of process models (e.g. Lucks/Meckl 2015) which analyze and describe the process of an M&A project in detail. On this basis, company-specific playbooks have generally been developed for practical use which on the one hand standardize the M&A process within a company, and on the other hand provide assistance to the people involved. (For more content on playbooks please use the link). The core element of playbooks are checklists.
Checklists are used throughout the entire M&A process. Especially during due diligence and post-merger integration (PMI), no M&A project can proceed without checklists. In practice, these lists are created in 99% of cases with the help of spreadsheet applications such as Microsoft Excel and are continuously maintained during the course of the project with great effort. The use of digital M&A platforms entails both challenges and opportunities which are described below using three dimensions: