tfs 2010 best practice

we have a very tricky situation which am sure can be avoided if dealt with properly.

There were 5 different branches of a specific application in our TFS 2010. All the branches were merged into 1 branch and since the merging was done by a system administrator who w开发者_运维问答asn't part of the development team, we ended up cleaning the code (adding the missed changes from 3 separate places where ever they were conflicts) This amounted to almost 2 weeks of extra effort to get the code branch stabilised and tested before proceeding further.

What should be the best practice to be followed to avoid such frustrations in future as we have multiple code branches for different development projects running on same applications.

See the Visual Studio ALM Rangers Team Foundation Server 2010 Branching Guide.