I’ve been working a couple of projects lately that have me thinking about the right (and more importantly, wrong) ways to onboard a new E&P acquisition.

I’ve spent a lot of my career as a reservoir engineer in the A&D world worried about valuation, bid sheets, and financing. But a tough truth is that many good acquisitions go bad because of onboarding.

When acquisition onboarding goes poorly, the damage is long-lasting. Production misses targets, OPEX runs high, teams that were already lean get completely burned out. Systems limp along in “temporary” states that quietly become permanent. Onboarding timelines stretch out into months or years, and in many cases never truly finish. What should have been a quick, tight integration becomes a long, grinding Slog.

These outcomes are rarely caused by bad assets or poor talent. More often, onboarding fails because it’s structured incorrectly. The teams that consistently protect deal economics do onboarding differently: they treat it as a sequence of focused Sprints.

The Phases of Onboarding

When the data and software onboarding for an E&P acquisition goes wrong, a few problems show up almost immediately:

• Decision fatigue accumulates as too many changes happen at once
• Partial migrations linger, and onboarding never truly finishes
• First‑year cash flow misses plan because teams can’t see performance clearly enough to respond

Each of these problems compounds the others. The longer onboarding drags on, the harder it becomes to justify dedicating real resources to finish it. Missing 1st year cash flow means no budget to fix things. Partial migrations mean you can’t drop the old software and cut G&A!

Switching to a sprint‑based structure doesn’t eliminate work, but it concentrates effort where it matters and helps reduce fatigue. Let’s dive in on the three phases we usually see!

My finest PowerPoint graphing.

Phase 1: From PSA to Closing — Plan Relentlessly

After the Purchase and Sale Agreement (PSA) is signed but before the transaction closes, the goal is clarity. Use this window to answer key questions early: what exactly is changing on Day 1, what can safely wait, and who owns each decision. This is the time to build a realistic playbook for what’s going to happen down the road. Write the recipe before baking the cake!

If you were confident enough to sign a PSA, you should be confident enough to prepare for the deal to close. Roles and responsibilities should be explicitly assigned here. Software contracts and implementation statements of work should be negotiated (but probably not signed til Closing!). Detailed onboarding plans should be built system by system, including realistic expectations for seller data exports. Clarifying those expectations before Closing is far easier than renegotiating them after.

We often hear clients that basically skip this step entirely and wait until Closing to do anything. That’s a huge lost opportunity. Key questions about technology should be included in the Due Diligence list – what software does the seller use for key applications like The Big Six? What licenses and subscriptions are included in the assets being transferred? Buyers often don’t want to distract the seller with “secondary” questions like these. But I’d argue that any seller that refuses to answer basic technology questions during DD isn’t interested in the buyer actually succeeding. That should be a giant waving red flag, every bit as much as a title defect or missing midstream contracts.

Phase 2: From Closing to Takeover — The Sprint Begins!

From Closing to Takeover (aka the end of a Transition Services Agreement) is where onboarding finally feels real. This phase benefits from urgency, structure, and focus. Initial data exports should happen quickly, everyone should know their role, and success criteria should be clear and measurable. Energy and enthusiasm are high, people are still fresh and excited to get their shiny new toys.

I’ve seen some teams freeze up in this phase: if it’s an operated asset with a TSA in place, you may not actually control operations yet, so it can feel like you’re treading water until the TSA is over. DON’T LET THAT SLOW YOU DOWN. There are tons of valuable things you can do here, like sign the final contracts with new vendors, hold kickoff meetings, start working with initial data export formats. Some disciplines are ready to go ahead and move data – set up cost centers in Accounting, build the flow network diagrams in Production, populate your Document Management System (yes, SharePoint/Teams counts as a Document Management System).

This sprint is about momentum, not perfection. “You can just do things.” Go ahead and start delivering real work products ASAP. Map the old chart of accounts to the new and migrate legacy Seller data into your Lease Operating Statement report in Spotfire or Power BI. Update your well lists. Publish the official acquisition plan database out of your Reserves system. Just don’t freeze up, start running!

Phase 3: Takeover and Beyond — An Even Faster Sprint

Once the operational Takeover arrives, teams that planned and sprinted well earlier can move decisively. Final data exports occur, migrations are completed, and the focus shifts to data quality rather than basic functionality. That’s what always happens, right?!

The truth is that we often see teams completely worn out by the time the TSA ends. They are spread like too much butter on too little toast. To live up to the promises made to their investors, everything is happening at once – cutting OPEX, standing up drilling rigs, negotiating the little follow-on acquisitions that often come behind the big one. The idea of finishing a long day of doing your “real job” just to start working on some data QC is…….not appealing.

Temporary staffing is often the right move during this time. Acquisition onboarding creates short‑term workload spikes that don’t justify permanent headcount, but absolutely justify specialized resources. Find consultants who know their way around the unfamiliar systems you’re migrating out of or in to. Add an extra Data Engineer or BI Analyst for a few months to get through the burst of requests. Rent those resources, don’t buy them.

Big Mistakes to Avoid

Three big mistakes that we see often:

First, don’t change everything at once. In our experience, successful teams limit Day 1 change. Changing no more than half the tech stack at Takeover dramatically reduces risk. Examples from the Big Six:

• Reserves often migrates first because they’re the one that worked the deal at the beginning.
• ERP decisions are the stickiest: they should be made early and permanently.
• Land and Production Allocation need to align closely with ERP eventually, but doing some of that with spreadsheets can be a satisfactory Band-Aid for a few months.
• Systems like Well Lifecycle and SCADA are often far easier to postpone until the organization has stabilized.

Second, don’t ignore the Seller’s team. They may be selling at the end of a bad financial result, but there are always people in a Seller’s organization that know how things could have been done better. (Hint: they are usually the rank-and-file, not necessarily the execs.) Find a data-savvy person in the trenches and buy them their favorite beverage. What did they like or not like about the systems they used? What did they always wish they could have done, but never had the time? What datasets are they confident in, vs. which did they know have quality problems?

Finally, don’t wait to build analytics tools. In the best onboardings, dashboards and reports are built early using both old and new data. You have to be able to show the team how they are doing versus the plan ASAP. Instead of migrating every historical transaction into the ERP, considering blending the legacy and current data side by side. This supports decision‑making while reinforcing good data habits around well ties, production volumes, cost coding, and estimates.

Wrap Up

Acquisitions fail for lots of reasons – overpaying, catching a bad break on commodity prices, an upside zone that doesn’t come through. Don’t let the technology be a cause of acquisition failure – that’s totally in your control, and totally preventable.

Put your team in a position to Sprint! When onboarding is treated as a Slog, it stretches indefinitely, draining energy and value from the deal. When it is designed as a sequence of focused sprints, teams move faster, spend less, and protect the economics they worked so hard to create.

If you liked this and it resonated with you, give us a call! We love to nerd out on this kind of stuff.

LLMs helped me break some writer’s block and cleaned up some structure, but every word of it was debated, re-written, and pondered over by me.