Change management

Organizational change management

A system that goes live and a system that gets used are two different outcomes, and the gap between them is rarely technical. Change management is what closes it — and it runs underneath the whole implementation rather than arriving at the end as training.

The cycle

Change on a Primavera program does not arrive once. It arrives in waves — a module, a business unit, a release, a new reporting requirement. So this is a cycle rather than a checklist: what Reinforce measures is exactly what the next Assess starts from.

Each stage names the phase of delivery it usually lands in, but the cycle belongs to the change — not to the project plan.

Assess

Planning

Stakeholder map
Change impact analysis
Readiness baseline

Align

Planning / Design

Sponsor commitment
Leadership coalition
Agreed case for change

Engage

Design / Implementation

Message and channels
Cadence people can rely on
A route for answering back

Enable

Implementation

Role-based training
Super-user network
Documentation people reuse

Adopt

Deployment

Go-live support
Floor-walking
Fast issue resolution

Reinforce

Support

Adoption measurement
Coaching and refreshers
Sustainment handover

Where it goes wrong

Change management booked as training

The most common version of this failure is a plan where change management is a line item three weeks before go‑live, called "user training." By then every decision that would have needed explaining has already been made, the people whose jobs changed found out from a calendar invite, and the training is teaching a system nobody agreed to.

The second most common is treating it as communication only — newsletters and a launch email. Communication tells people a change is coming. It does not make anyone able to do their job differently on Monday.

The stages that get skipped are Assess and Reinforce, because they sit outside the build and neither produces a demo. They are also the two that determine whether the rest was worth doing.

Who does what

Change management is the part of an implementation a consultancy cannot do to you. We can run the cycle, build the materials and train the trainers — but sponsorship, and the authority to tell people the new way is the way, has to come from inside your organization.

We lead

Change impact and readiness assessment
Communications planning and materials
Role-based training design and delivery
Super-user enablement and train-the-trainer
Adoption measurement and the findings that come from it

You lead

Executive sponsorship, visible and sustained
The decision that the old way is closed
Naming super-users and protecting their time
Line-manager reinforcement after go-live
Owning the cycle once we hand it over

If the sponsorship is not there, we would rather say so at the start than run a change program around an absence and bill you for it.

How it sits against delivery

On the delivery methodology, change management is the band running underneath all five phases. That is deliberate — it is not a sixth phase that happens after Support, and it is not a workstream that starts once the configuration is agreed.

See the delivery methodology →