Explore the Levels of Change Management

How Success Stories Can Accelerate Your Change Capability

Written by Karen Ball

3 Mins

Success stories offer tremendous opportunities to learn from other change leaders. The decisions they made and actions they took to achieve successful change outcomes can inform your creativity, strategies and approaches, and streamline your efforts. Their wins and learning opportunities offer unique insights you can apply immediately to unlock the complex change challenges you face today.

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Prosci success stories come from clients in multiple industries, and organizations of different sizes and with different change management structures. Each story shares the organization’s challenges, approaches they followed to overcome them, and the results they achieved.

Change Management Success Stories

Our clients follow many paths, but the biggest successes with change tend to emerge from tried and true approaches. Prosci success stories all share three particular aspects—each of which you can apply in your own change management work, knowing it will have a positive impact.  

Define project success

The first step in the Prosci 3-Phase Process is to define success. Every success story offers the unique organization’s clear definition of success, whether it is for project success for a particular change initiative or enterprise change capability. When defining success, these organizations focus on both the technical side and people side of change to achieve a Unified Value Proposition.

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For example, the definition of success for one Prosci client meant integrating change management with project management. This enhanced loyalty and retention, reduced client turnover, and significantly boosted sales. For another client, success meant building a change management program that completely transformed the way change management is done in government.  

Apply the ADKAR Model

Each of the 25 organizations we profiled has adopted ADKAR as their individual change model. The Prosci ADKAR Model is deeply embedded in the Prosci Methodology, role activation, blueprints for activities, and more, to drive Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement as individual and project milestones during change. And these organizations know well that organizational change only happens when individual people change.

For one client, using ADKAR as a storytelling framework for complex structural and cultural changes led to successes like greater customer and employee satisfaction, an improved financial position, and projects coming in on time and on budget. The ADKAR Model also prepared 48,000 employees from another organization to adopt a significant digital transformation, complete the successful project on schedule, and thrive in their new way of working.  

Leverage best practices

Prosci’s Best Practices in Change Management research enabled each organization we profiled to explore and apply growing trends in the change management discipline. It also revealed the creative ways other organizations around the world leverage change management to their advantage. As primary research, the findings offer first-hand, real-world insights on organizational successes and challenges.

The extensive body of knowledge in the research offered meaningful support for many change-related issues, such as overcoming project hurdles with change saturation and fatigue, mitigating resistance, and integrating project management and change management. The research also helped when streamlining processes, implementing project portfolio management, enhancing organizational excellence, and more.

3 Themes in Change Management Successes

Embedding change management capabilities into the fabric of their organizations has produced many positive outcomes for these clients. And each outcome was a critical contributor to the future state they defined for success. Although every story is unique, success stories share common themes that can guide you when defining your own organization’s desired future state.

1. They deliver project results

Each of these successful initiatives would be defined as a “must-win” change for the organization. The initiatives are strategic, visible and highly dependent upon people engaging, adopting and using the change. And the organizations can clearly demonstrate success from change management. These clients understood that even when the technical side of the solution was solid, no matter how much they spent on the new design or technology, a high level of adoption was the required to realize desired benefits and outcomes.

2. They actively work on maturing their enterprise change capability

The second key theme across success stories is the intent and desire to mature in the discipline of enterprise change management (or ECM)—to make that transition from project-based change to building enterprise change capability. Building change capability is like a journey through mountain terrain with peaks and valleys along the way. But summiting the highest peak takes time, structure and intent. The organizations we profile in success stories know the benefits of building change capability and work to make enterprise change management part of their organization’s DNA.CDOT-quote

3. They focus on training and skill building

Training and skill building for key roles in change is essential. But these organizations don’t simply send everyone to change management certification. Their training strategies intentionally focus on building specific, role-based competencies for change practitioners, change leaders and change agents. This includes individuals in transformation offices or in project management offices with individuals who are working on the people side of change.

Learn From Other Change Leaders

Prosci's mission is to help individuals and organizations build their own change capability. So, when we share client successes, we focus on how they’re building change capability and share the most relevant information—so you can begin your own journey without reinventing the wheel.

 

Download the eBook, "6 Tatics for Growing Enterprise Change Capability."

Karen Ball

Karen Ball

Karen Ball é uma Prosci Senior Fellow, Executive Instructor e Profissional Certificada em Gestão de Mudanças (CCMP™). Sua paixão é encantar os clientes com soluções inovadoras que os equipem para o sucesso na mudança. Karen é autora frequente de artigos e blogs de liderança de pensamento da Prosci, facilitadora de webinars e palestrante de conferências que traz 35 anos de experiência e histórias para palcos presenciais e virtuais.

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