Mergers and Acquisitions

Mergers and acquisitions are an every day part of high-tech industries. So it was no big surprise when the client I was working with sold of their business to another company.

What did this sale mean in terms of product documentation? The company being sold had 1600 documents, and every one of them needed to be reviewed from several perspectives. Is it complete and accurate? Is the information presented in a useful way for customers? How can the existing documentation of the old (being acquired) company be made more consistent with the documentation standards of the new (acquiring) company?

The first and most obvious need was to build a team to examine documents, abandon those that would no longer be needed in the new company, and update all the other documents in terms of both content and format.

So I advertised for resumes, spoke to other professional tech writers I already knew, and sifted through mountains of information to find my top candidates.

I interviewed dozens of candidates, and wound up hiring 5 of them (6 counting myself). It was the most knowledgeable and hard-working team I’ve ever had the pleasure to be associated with, and I’ve never been prouder of any team.

As a team, we sifted through over 1600 documents, updated about 300, and developed tools to automate many of the repetitive tasks involved in updating content and format for the new company. And we did all of that in just 4 months! At our peak of production, each team member was turning out from one to three document revisions (depending on the size of the document) each and every day. By the time the business was handed-off to the acquiring company, all documentation was in good shape to meet the legal and marketing requirements spelled out in the merger agreement, and all aspects of the merger were completed on time and to everyone’s satisfaction.