Acquisitions move fast. There's deal pressure, timeline pressure, and organizational pressure to get the acquired book onto the parent agency's platform as quickly as possible. In that environment, migration specialists often get brought in late — after the timeline is committed, after the staff have been told the go-live date, after everyone's expectations have been set.
This is a setup for problems.
What Early Involvement Actually Means
Early involvement means being engaged at the proposal stage — before the deal closes, before the timeline is locked, before the decisions that constrain everything else have been made. At that stage, a migration specialist can do things that simply aren't possible later:
- Assess the actual complexity of the source data and give a realistic timeline estimate
- Flag issues that could affect deal structure or transition planning
- Help set expectations with both parties about what "go-live" actually means
- Design the Epic environment that will receive the data before the migration begins
What to Ask Before Signing
If you're in the middle of an acquisition and haven't yet engaged a migration specialist, here are the questions you should be asking: How clean is the source data? What's the actual timeline for a quality migration — not the fastest possible migration? What needs to be built in Epic before data can be imported? And who's going to train the staff on the new environment?
These questions are much easier to answer before the deal closes than after.