How does a Canadian E&P run a 90-day seller-side IT readiness sprint?

You're an 80-person Canadian operator. You've been approached twice this quarter - once by a strategic, once by a financial. The conversations are still informal. There's no LOI. There's no banker. But the signal is unmistakable: you'll be in market within 12 months whether you choose it or it chooses you.

Most operators in this position do nothing until the LOI lands. They learn what's broken about their operation in week three of diligence, after the buyer's team has found it and priced it accordingly. The 90-day readiness sprint is the disciplined alternative - and across thirty M&A transactions, the operators who run it cleanly recover the equivalent of one full multiple turn on the sale.

What the sprint actually is

A focused 90-day program that simulates buyer's diligence on your own operation, finds the things a buyer's team will find, and fixes them on your schedule rather than under deal pressure.

The structure: three 30-day phases, with named owners and specific deliverables at each milestone.

• Phase 1 (Days 1-30): Audit and prioritize. Run buyer's diligence on yourself. Categorize findings by materiality.
• Phase 2 (Days 31-60): Critical remediation. Fix the top three findings - usually some combination of JIB aging, cyber documentation, and vendor stack messiness.
• Phase 3 (Days 61-90): Data room construction and pressure testing. Build the data room. Have a trusted advisor pressure-test it before you ever show it to a buyer.

Phase 1 - The honest audit

The first thirty days are the hardest because they require honesty about your own operation.

The audit covers six categories the buyer's team will look at:

1. Financial integrity - three years audited financials, clean trial balance, reconciled balance sheet
2. Production data integrity - well-by-well monthly production, three years history, reconciled to revenue
3. Operational discipline - AFE register reconciled, JIBs current, regulatory filings up to date
4. Technical and IT capability - system inventory, architecture diagrams, vendor stack, contract terms
5. Cyber posture - twelve controls deployed, documented, recently tested
6. People and culture - key person retention plans, employment agreements, knowledge transfer feasibility

For each category, the deliverable is a one-page findings document. Top three issues. Materiality (high / medium / low). Owner. Remediation effort estimate. By end of day 30, you have a one-page-per-category summary that is the entire diligence picture from a buyer's perspective.

Phase 2 - Fix the top three

Days 31-60 focus exclusively on the top three findings across all six categories. Not the top three in each category - the top three overall, by potential multiple impact.

The most common high-impact findings across the operators we've worked with:

• Unreconciled JIB balances older than 12 months. Typical fix: focused 30-day reconciliation push. Recovers 80-90% of aged balances.
• Cyber posture documentation gaps. The controls may exist, but the evidence doesn't. Fix: documented architecture, named products, dated test restore evidence, completed vendor risk attestation.
• Vendor contract messiness. Material change-of-control clauses, MSP contracts with 24-36 month tails, license configurations that won't transfer. Fix: full vendor inventory, contract review, renegotiation where leverage exists.
• Production data variances that don't reconcile. Volumes that don't match revenue, allocations that don't tie to working interest, gas plant statements that don't match measurement data. Fix: focused reconciliation by month, signed-off variance explanations.

Two months. Three issues. Named owner per issue. Weekly review with the CFO. By end of day 60, the most material issues are either fixed or have documented progress.

Phase 3 - Build the data room (and pressure-test it)

Days 61-90 construct the actual data room and test it before any buyer sees it.

The data room follows a canonical structure that buyers' teams recognize. Twelve top-level folders:

• 01 - Corporate (incorporation, governance, ownership, captable)
• 02 - Financials (audited statements, monthly close reports, tax filings)
• 03 - Production (volumes, working interest, allocations, hedge book)
• 04 - Reserves (reserves report, decline curves, type curves)
• 05 - Operations (AFEs, JIBs, partner statements, field operations)
• 06 - Regulatory (AER filings, environmental compliance, permits)
• 07 - Commercial (gas plant agreements, midstream contracts, marketing)
• 08 - IT and Cyber (system inventory, architecture, twelve controls evidence)
• 09 - Vendors (vendor list, contracts, materiality flags)
• 10 - People (org chart, employment agreements, key person plans)
• 11 - Legal (litigation, contracts, IP, claims)
• 12 - Narrative documents (operations narrative, IT capability narrative, cyber posture narrative)

The narrative documents in folder 12 are the most underused asset in mid-market data rooms. They're how you control the story before the buyer's team builds their own version.

Days 76-90: a trusted M&A advisor - not your eventual banker, somebody you trust who has done this before - pressure-tests the data room. Finds the gaps. Flags the inconsistencies. Surfaces the questions a sophisticated buyer will ask. Fix what they find. Now you're ready to go to market.

The full 90-day playbook - including the diligence simulation worksheet, the gap remediation tracker, the data room category checklist, and the three narrative document templates - lives in Clean Data Room. Chapter 4 is the sprint in detail.

If you'd rather have someone run the sprint alongside you, the IT-and-the-Cycle Assessment is the structured entry point - three to five days, written report, no obligation.