Change Management done well is not some vague mystical art. It doesn’t depend on the hypnotic influence of a Jedi knight change manager to sway a crowd. It doesn’t depend on the martial power of an authoritarian leader to force people’s compliance.

Sure – if you have a Jedi knight or a dictator, you’ll get the change done but it won’t be pretty. Change management done badly causes unexpected negative consequences.

Change management done badly causes unexpected negative consequences.

Change management done well prepares people for a change with the required ability and intrinsic motivation. Change management done well results in people happily choosing the new over the old.

Change management done well results in people happily choosing the new over the old.

Change management done well is the result of a repeatable methodology, using scientifically-grounded techniques to match what the organisation needs with what its impacted people need.

Change management is scientific, it’s humanistic, it’s systematic, and done well it can make the difference between success and failure.  

  • Scientific means it is evidence-based, and the results have been rigorously repeated by peers. It can be academic evidence (e.g. from psychology) or best-practice evidence from multiple reliable sources over multiple years.
  • Humanistic I mean it’s people-centered: it acknowledges the criticality of people in the project and optimises the project for them, just as an IT specialist would optimise the technology.
  • Systematic means it operates predictably, has known inputs and outputs, causes and effects, and has an understood optimum operating state.

Change management is scientific, it’s humanistic, it’s systematic.

If you’re a project manager, you use an industry-standard project delivery methodology to deliver different projects, whether agile or waterfall. You tailor the methodology to the organisation and the project.  If you’re a software engineer, you use the same code structures, software libraries, and communication protocols to create different applications. The standard frameworks you use are selected and extended depending on the project and organisation.

Whether you’re a project manager, engineer, accountant, or sales director, to get a good result every time you use a repeatable evidence-based methodology, tailored for the work at a hand using your knowledge and experience.

Change management done well is no different. At SMS, our project change management methodology is based on the de facto global standard Prosci ADKAR framework. We use other methodologies when appropriate – like Influencer, PCI from ChangeFirst, or our clients’ in-house frameworks – but we always use one that is scientific, humanistic, and systematic.

Prosci’s own research over 18 years has consistently found that projects with excellent change management were six times more likely to meet or exceed their objectives than those with poor change management.

Furthermore, the second-greatest contributor to project success is an structured change management approach. 

A what’s the biggest contributor to project success? Active and visible executive sponsorship. But that’s a whole other movie.