CXOJoe Executive Systems Diagnostic
What should you retain or change across the businesses?
Before an acquisition, after close but before integration, or while combining operations, you may need to decide what should become common and what should remain different. Before committing to shared services, systems, or capital expenditure, it helps to understand how each business takes work from customer commitment to delivery and cash.
The Diagnostic can examine one recurring operating problem that affects that decision. Before acquisition, that may mean examining a recurring delivery constraint to test an assumption about how the business operates. Before or during integration, it may mean delays when work transfers between businesses or an approval neither team clearly owns.
The review takes two weeks and has a fixed standard fee of $5,800. We confirm the particular problem and the businesses and activities needed to examine it. Full acquisition due diligence or an integration program requires a separate scope.
What needs to be combined, and what can remain separate?
The same job title or system field can conceal different responsibilities. Two businesses may also use different methods to meet different customer requirements.
I compare the relevant activity in each business: customers and service commitments, how work is delivered, supply-chain overlaps and gaps, systems and tools, processes, economics, and ownership. Using the same questions for each business makes overlaps, differences, and dependencies easier to assess. A shared activity needs a credible benefit and workable handoffs; a local practice may be worth retaining because it meets a customer requirement or protects a control that works. The review considers the cost and disruption of a change alongside the problem it would address, before you commit to systems, shared services, or capital.
Within the agreed problem, I examine questions such as:
- Which customer commitments and controls must remain intact when work moves between businesses?
- Where do differences in approvals, responsibilities, or records cause repeated delays or errors?
- Would moving a task into shared services remove a difficulty or transfer it to another team?
- Which local knowledge does the work depend on, and how would that knowledge remain available?
- What needs to be understood before making a commitment that will be expensive to reverse?
The findings can support retaining a working arrangement, changing it, or investigating further before committing. The comparison includes formal roles, actual work, capability needs, ownership, decision rights, and the handoffs the operating arrangement requires.
Before recommending a shared activity, I check who supplies its inputs, who can decide, and who carries the exception when the handoff fails. A common approval can improve control and also delay work that previously moved locally. Those dependencies belong in the integration decision.
Which path is supported?
- Retain or defer
- Keep a useful arrangement, or resolve a material unknown before changing it.
- Change or combine
- Build, buy, integrate, standardize, automate, reassign, or stop an activity where the evidence supports it. A mixed path may serve the businesses better.
- Sequence the work
- Settle the required inputs, ownership, and dependencies before committing to the next change.
Start with a specific difficulty across the businesses
A useful scope might be repeated delays when work transfers between two sites, slow release-to-billing after a carve-out, or delivery commitments made without a shared understanding of available capacity.
The review compares the relevant work in each business. It does not assume that one company’s process should become the model for the others.
For the material alternatives, I compare downstream work, people and role effects, systems and process effects, financial consequence, dependencies, and the later decisions each choice would create. Where the evidence permits, the comparison includes the cost of retaining the current state as well as the cost of changing it; “too expensive to change” is a question to test.
We define the decision horizon with the scope. I follow a branch far enough to identify effects that could change the immediate decision, then stop when further detail would not change that choice or the evidence runs out. Supported ranges and uncertainty remain visible; unresolved branches become next questions rather than an unlimited study.
Portfolio reporting is a separate question
If businesses use different definitions for backlog, capacity, margin, or on-time delivery, a consolidated report can be difficult to interpret.
For example, one backlog figure may include every booked order while another includes only released work. I compare the definition and calculation, the work included, the reporting period and event dates, and the source records. That shows whether the figures describe different operations, different counting rules, or both—and what leadership needs them to answer.
That reporting disagreement may itself be the problem to review. Making the figures comparable is distinct from deciding how far to combine the operations; one does not automatically answer the other.
A hypothetical comparison: the same label answers two different questions. Reconcile the included work, event dates and counting rules before interpreting the difference.
What you receive
You receive written findings showing what was reviewed, where the businesses differ, and how those differences relate to the selected problem. The recommendations explain what could be combined, what may need to remain separate, what should happen first, and what still needs investigation.
The executive readout gives leadership a chance to challenge those conclusions, examine the supported costs and expected benefits, and decide what needs to be understood before committing resources.
Make the next commitment with the relevant facts in view
The Diagnostic provides findings and a usable correction for the agreed problem. You can take the work forward with your team or discuss further CXOJoe help. Larger implementation is optional, depends on the findings, and requires a separate scope.
One recurring operating problem. Two weeks. $5,800.
Have a question about the scope? Book a Call.