A regional health insurer acquires a 420,000-member plan carved out of its parent company, and has eighteen months of transitional services to become independent of the seller. This suite is the full program record: 67 documents covering governance, planning, execution, control and closeout — written as point-in-time artifacts, each true only as of its own date.
The program does not go smoothly, and that is the point. Antitrust law bars an acquirer from examining member-level records before closing, so the estimate for resolving two member databases into one was made blind — and six months after close the first lawful measurement returned a manual review population three times the model. The risk register had scored it Critical ten weeks earlier, with an owner and a mitigation already running. It happened anyway.
What follows is a program that spent negotiated schedule margin rather than breaching a contractual maximum, deferred scope to named owners rather than absorbing everything into cost, and finished inside its authorized funding while carrying a permanent shortfall in cumulative synergy capture. Both of those last two are true at once, and the closeout report says so.
Where to start. If you read one document, read the Application Disposition Matrix — it is where the integration strategy is actually decided, system by system. If you read three, add Data Profiling Results (the crisis) and Lessons Learned (why it was structurally guaranteed). How to Read This Suite explains the annotation colors and the point-in-time convention that makes these documents disagree with one another on purpose.
Program Kickoff Deck
A 19-slide pre-close deck that states plainly its own budget rests on an estimate nobody is legally allowed to verify yet.
Clean Team Protocol
You may not integrate before you close. This is the protocol that lets planning proceed without anyone seeing what they must not see.
Organization Chart
Eighty-four named people. The roster legally changes shape at close — the Clean Team ends where the data stewards begin.
Application Disposition Matrix
The centerpiece decision: absorb, preserve, or best-of-both, argued system by system rather than declared.
TSA Schedule & Exit Plan
A TSA obliges the seller to provide a service, not to make you capable of it. Exiting one is the integration.
Risk Register
Dated ten weeks before the crisis it correctly predicts. Scored Critical, owned, mitigated — and with no idea what is coming.
Data Profiling Results
The crisis. Six months after close, the first lawful look at the member file returns a review band three times the deal model.
Change Control Log
Twelve requests, six approved. The log reconciles the baseline to the outturn exactly — and names the constraint each request protected and spent.
Steering Committee Deck — Slides
The May 2024 escalation as 21 slides. Slide 9 names the option that costs nothing, breaches no date, and is the one the program most opposes.
Closeout Report
Late but whole. Inside authorized funding, inside the contractual maximum, with the cumulative synergy shortfall stated rather than buried.
Lessons Learned
Not a blame list. The estimate was constrained by law, the register got the risk right ten weeks early, and the overrun happened anyway.
Cost-Benefit Analysis
The synergy case, and it does not resolve cleanly — the Year 3 target is met while cumulative capture finishes behind model.
Total Cost of Ownership
What the estate costs to run once the program is gone. Every disposition decision was a claim about this number.
How to Read This Suite
Start here. What the annotations mean, why the documents disagree with each other on purpose, and what is fictional.