Part III. Implementation Practices

The thing that keeps a business ahead of the competition is excellence in execution.

Tom Peters

A successful integration team or practice is one that grows and thrives over time. Success is based on effective execution and not forced or mandated standards. Effective execution in turn is about being better, faster, and cheaper than the alternatives. The way one gets to be better, faster, and cheaper is by investing energy, time, and sometimes capital to improve processes. Simply wishing to be better is not enough—you need to do something to get better. And in order to continuously make process improvements, you need to become an expert in fact-based problem solving, measuring process effectiveness, and articulating the business value of investing in integration capabilities.

Part I of this book talked about strategy and vision. Part II talked about core principles and how to apply them. Part III is all about effective execution. After we wrote the first book on Integration Competency Centers in 2005, we received a tremendous amount of positive feedback but also many requests for more prescriptive practices around execution. This section of the book, we hope, addresses many of those requests.