The change management process is a structured approach for moving an organization from how it currently operates to a new way of working, covering everything from the earliest planning stages through implementation and long-term adoption. Whether the change involves new technology, a restructured team, a merger, or a shift in strategy, the process gives leaders and employees a shared roadmap so the transition actually sticks rather than fizzling out after a few weeks.
How the Process Works in Five Stages
While different frameworks slice the process into varying numbers of steps, most follow the same basic arc. Harvard Business School’s model captures it in five stages that apply to nearly any organizational change.
Prepare the organization. Before any logistics, you need cultural groundwork. This means helping employees see why the current way of doing things is no longer sustainable. Managers highlight specific problems, competitive pressures, or missed opportunities that make the case for change. The goal is to reduce resistance early by building genuine understanding, not just issuing a memo.
Create a vision and plan. Once people understand the “why,” leadership defines the “what” and “how.” A solid plan spells out the strategic goals the change supports, the specific milestones along the way, who is responsible for each piece, and how success will be measured. Vague ambitions like “become more innovative” don’t count. The plan needs concrete targets and timelines.
Implement the change. This is where the plan meets reality. Teams adopt new tools, follow new workflows, or shift reporting structures. Communication is constant during this phase because questions and friction are inevitable. Training happens here, and so do the first real tests of whether the plan holds up under day-to-day pressure.
Embed the change in culture. New processes only last if they become the default way people work. That means updating policies, adjusting performance metrics, and reinforcing the new behaviors through recognition and accountability. Skip this step and you’ll watch the organization slowly drift back to old habits.
Review and refine. After implementation, teams assess what worked and what didn’t. This isn’t a formality. Organizations that continuously adapt their change plans based on employee feedback are four times more likely to achieve change success, according to a 2025 Gartner survey of over 300 senior leaders.
Two Frameworks That Shape the Field
Most change management practitioners work from one of two well-known models. Understanding them helps you recognize what your own organization is doing (or should be doing) when it rolls out a major change.
The ADKAR Model
Developed by Prosci, ADKAR focuses on the individual. Its core philosophy is that organizations don’t change; people do. The acronym maps five sequential milestones every person needs to hit for a change to succeed:
- Awareness of why the change is happening
- Desire to support and participate in it
- Knowledge of what to do differently
- Ability to perform the new skills or behaviors
- Reinforcement to make the change permanent
ADKAR is especially useful for diagnosing where a change effort is stalling. If employees understand the change but aren’t doing anything differently, the gap is probably between Knowledge and Ability, meaning they need hands-on practice or better tools, not another all-hands meeting.
Kotter’s 8-Step Process
Originally published by Harvard professor John Kotter in his 1996 book “Leading Change,” this model takes a top-down, leadership-driven approach. The eight steps move from creating urgency, to assembling a guiding coalition of leaders across departments, to setting clear goals, to building a broader group of volunteers willing to champion the change at the team level. From there, leaders identify and remove obstacles (outdated rules, resource gaps, cultural resistance), celebrate early wins to maintain momentum, treat the change as a continuous process rather than a one-time event, and finally embed new practices into standard operations.
Where ADKAR zooms in on individual readiness, Kotter zooms out to organizational momentum. Many companies blend elements of both, using Kotter’s structure for the overall initiative and ADKAR to track how individual teams are progressing.
Key Roles in the Process
Change doesn’t happen by committee email. It requires people in specific roles doing specific things.
The executive sponsor is the senior leader who owns the change. Their job is to be actively and visibly involved from start to finish, not just to approve the budget and disappear. They communicate directly with employees about why the change matters, and they build a coalition of other leaders and influencers who lend the initiative credibility. Research consistently identifies active sponsorship as the single biggest factor in whether a change initiative succeeds or fails.
The change practitioner (sometimes called a change manager) handles the day-to-day mechanics. They evaluate the size and impact of the change, develop a customized strategy scaled to the effort, and create specific plans for communications, training, and sponsor activities. Think of them as the project manager for the people side of the change.
Change agents are employees embedded in affected teams who serve as a bridge between leadership and the frontline. They relay key messages, surface concerns early, and give leadership a realistic picture of how the change is actually landing. Without this feedback loop, leaders often don’t realize the change is going sideways until it’s too late to course-correct.
People managers carry an outsized share of the work because they’re the ones employees trust most. They translate the big-picture vision into what it means for their team’s daily work, coach individuals through the transition, and flag obstacles that need executive attention.
Change Management in IT
In technology teams, “change management” often refers to something more specific: controlling modifications to IT systems so that updates don’t break things. The ITIL 4 framework (a widely adopted set of IT service management practices) calls this “change enablement” to distinguish it from the broader organizational process.
ITIL 4 categorizes changes into three types. Standard changes are low-risk, repeatable updates that are pre-approved and often automated. Normal changes require a risk assessment and formal approval, with the level of scrutiny scaling to how complex or impactful the change is. Emergency changes address urgent issues like security incidents; they’re fast-tracked but still require a review after implementation.
Approval doesn’t necessarily mean sitting through a long Change Advisory Board (CAB) meeting. ITIL 4 introduced the concept of a “change authority,” which decentralizes decision-making. Depending on the risk level, approval might come from an automated pipeline for routine deployments, a peer review for standard changes, or senior business stakeholders for high-risk changes. The goal is to match the speed of approval to the level of risk, rather than routing every minor update through the same bottleneck.
Why Change Efforts Fail
The uncomfortable reality is that a large share of organizational changes fall short of their goals. The reasons tend to cluster around a few recurring patterns.
Skipping the people side is the most common. Organizations invest heavily in the technical or structural aspects of a change, like new software, new org charts, new processes, but treat communication and training as afterthoughts. Employees who don’t understand why the change is happening or how to do their jobs differently will resist it, work around it, or simply wait it out.
Uneven impact creates friction too. When a change like AI adoption reshapes work at different speeds across teams, some employees struggle to keep up while others barely notice. That unevenness breeds resentment and confusion if leadership treats the rollout as uniform.
There’s also a subtler risk Gartner’s research highlights: employees who “perform” change without truly adopting it. They attend the trainings and use the right language because they see career benefits in being associated with the initiative, but their actual work habits don’t shift. This makes the change look successful on paper while the underlying problems persist.
Over-collaborating can backfire as well. While employee input is valuable, trying to co-create every aspect of a change slows progress, and frequent pivots based on feedback can increase frustration and disengagement rather than reduce it. The most effective approach is to involve employees meaningfully at key decision points while maintaining enough consistency that people can actually follow the plan.
What It Looks Like in Practice
A company migrating to a new enterprise software platform offers a useful example of how these pieces fit together. The executive sponsor announces the change and explains the business case, perhaps the old system can’t support the company’s growth or is creating compliance risk. The change practitioner assesses which departments will be most affected and builds a communication and training timeline. Change agents in each department relay concerns back to the project team. Managers coach their direct reports through the learning curve, adjusting workloads during the transition. After launch, the team monitors adoption metrics, celebrates departments that hit milestones, and addresses pockets of resistance with targeted support rather than blanket mandates.
The process is the same whether the change is a technology rollout, a post-merger integration, or a shift to hybrid work. Define the destination, prepare the people, execute with structure, and reinforce until the new way of working becomes simply the way things are done.