Mastering Organizational Change: Turn Big Challenges Into Successes

Is Your Organization Equipped to Succeed? Critical Questions to Ask 

Before launching any significant transformation, leaders should honestly evaluate their organization's capability to manage change. Prosci's more than two decades of research involving more than 10,000 change practitioners identifies critical success factors that determine change outcomes. 

Ask these essential questions to understand whether you’re equipped to succeed: 

Do you have active and visible executive sponsorship?

Prosci’s Best Practices in Change Management research consistently identifies this as the top contributor to success. The reverse is also true. Ineffective sponsorship correlates with a 27% project success rate. Is your executive sponsor personally engaged, publicly supporting the change, and building a coalition with other leaders?

Correlation of Sponsor Effectiveness With Meeting Objectives

Has your organization defined a clear change management strategy?  

Have you developed a comprehensive approach tailored to your organization's unique needs and culture, or are you relying on generic templates? 

Do your dedicated change resources have advanced capabilities?  

Are your change practitioners equipped with the specialized skills needed to support today’s complex transformations? 

Can you effectively address resistance at all levels?  

Do you have sophisticated mechanisms to identify, prevent, mitigate and address resistance across the organization? 

Prosci Research on Avoidable Resistance 

Do you measure change adoption and its impact on results?

Failing to measure performance correlates with project success just 24% of the time, according to our research, as compared with 76% for those who do measure. 

Have you clearly defined what success looks like?

How Defining Goals and Objectives Correlates With Success

Source: Prosci Research Hub, ©2023

Change management equips you to answer these questions with a resounding yes. Our research shows that projects with excellent change management are seven times more likely to meet objectives than those with poor change management. 

If you answered "no" to any of the questions above, your approach needs a closer look before taking a risk on any complex transformation. 

Correlation Between Change Management Effectiveness and Meeting Objectives 

Advanced Change Management for Organizational Challenges 

Understanding your organization's change capabilities is only the first step. The next critical step is addressing the specific challenges—and ability gaps—that threaten your success.  

Organizations face four common obstacles that require advanced change management skills to overcome effectively. By identifying which of these challenges most affects your initiatives, you can target your improvement efforts where they'll deliver maximum impact. 

Let's examine each challenge and the advanced solutions that can transform your results. 

Challenge #1: Establishing and maintaining healthy conditions for project success 

What do healthy projects and initiatives have in common? They have strong leadership and sponsorship, project management, and change management, as well as a shared definition of success.  

But what happens when your organization is unaware of project health issues or your teams lack the skills to identify them? Warning signs that go unnoticed until the initiative is significantly off track can lead to costly delays and rework, and even project failure.  

Solution: Proactively manage project health 

Prosci Change Triangle (PCT)

Our Improve Project Health program equips your change team to identify warning signs of project failure before they become critical issues. Learning to apply the Prosci Change Triangle (PCT) Model with advanced approaches equips your change practitioners with next-level skills not taught in our certification program, such as how to: 

• Assess project health – Knowing a project’s health at a point in time helps organizations proactively address risks before they emerge. The PCT Model provides a holistic look at the aspects and factors that matter most to change success.  

• Align project and change leaders – Getting people to a shared vision of change can be challenging. The PCT Model provides the anchoring factors for stakeholders to discuss and align around.  

• Identify project risks – Knowing a problem exists is different from knowing the problem. The PCT Model identifies 40 specific factors across four aspects, each of which can be the source of potential risks to project success.  

• Track project success – knowing a project’s health over time helps leaders identify and act on negative and positive trends in the trajectory of a project. Using the PCT Model enables change practitioners to capture and share snapshots of project health throughout the project lifecycle.  

• Identify adaptive actions – Any number of potential actions can be taken on a project, but which will be the most valuable? The PCT Model offers a simple way to identify the specific options that improve overall project health.  

• Inform enterprise change management – Understanding patterns of project health across multiple projects can unlock enterprise insights. With the PCT Model, leaders can identify organizational strengths and areas of opportunity to increase change success. 

Mastering these advanced skills and activities improves your organization’s potential to achieve project objectives and organizational benefits.  

“The in-depth focus on the PCT was excellent. Prosci has expanded on this topic in a highly meaningful way and provided exceptional tools to leverage the PCT to its full potential.”  —Program Participant

Challenge #2: Resistance limits adoption and usage of the change 

Resistance management is an essential skill in change teams. Organizations tend to underestimate the impact of resistance on projects, teams and the people impacted by changes. Too often, leaders only support resistance management efforts after significant issues hold the project back, which results in subpar outcomes at best.   

Solution: Remove barriers to adoption 

Prosci ADKAR Model

The ADKAR® Model Mastery Level 1: Prevent Change Resistance program transforms how organizations approach resistance. Instead of reacting negatively or blaming people experiencing barriers, your practitioners acquire advanced skills to prevent resistance before it starts. The program builds their ability to: 

• Apply the ADKAR Model to prevent resistance
• Build an ADKAR Blueprint to enable change readiness
• Engage and involve impacted people and key business leaders
• Activate change leaders 

This advanced program also focuses on scaling change for impacted groups of all sizes, shares a cascading approach to role activation, and provides access to hundreds of detailed activities and tactics not offered in our Certified Change Practitioner Program.  

By shifting from reactive resistance management to proactive readiness building, organizations shift mindsets about resistance, conserve valuable project resources, and maintain momentum throughout changes. 

“It was just generally helpful for experienced practitioners to take their practice to the next level. As the director of my team, I’m not usually a change lead anymore, But I think sending my more senior folks would be great.”  —Program Participant

Challenge #3: Persistent barriers to adoption 

Even with careful planning during complex changes, people can continue to experience barriers that limit adoption and usage. When these barriers go unaddressed, your people and organization suffer and the project or initiative stalls. 

Even when your practitioners have been managing changes for years, they face difficult and new resistance-related issues that need a nuanced approach.  

Solution: Targeted barrier resolution 

The ADKAR Model Mastery Level 2: Resolve Change Barriers program provides advanced techniques for identifying and addressing persistent barriers to adoption. Working with experienced peers and seasoned facilitators, your practitioners learn specialized techniques to: 

• Apply the ADKAR Model to resolve barriers 
• Track ADKAR outcomes 
• Analyze ADKAR Assessments to identify root causes 
• Resolve persistent barrier points 

This capability proves particularly valuable for high-risk transformations where people need significant support to address barriers, such as an ERP implementation, adoption of AI tools, or an organizational restructuring.  

“I had no idea how rich the content and guidance would be. I learned a lot from the other participants and even more from the process and information in Knowledge Hub.”  —Program Participant

Challenge #4: Missed ROI due to misunderstanding what success looks like or how to track and measure 

Organizations and change teams struggle to quantify how change management activities contribute to business outcomes. Without this connection, important change work remains vulnerable to budget cuts and is perceived as “nice to have” instead of essential to project success. 

Solution: Performance-focused change management 

Change Management Performance

The Achieve Change Performance program transforms how organizations measure change impact using the Prosci Change Performance Framework. Advanced practitioners learn to:

• Define clear metrics that connect adoption to business results 
• Track and measure change performance indicators aligned with organizational objectives 
• Translate people-side progress into business value language that resonates with executives 
• Demonstrate the ROI of change management investments with tangible data 

This capability shifts perceptions of change management from a support function to a strategic enabler of business results, securing both resources and executive support for critical initiatives. 

“It’s so important to put data behind change management work to keep leadership engaged and supportive of the work.” —Program Participant

The Path Forward: Investing in Advanced Change Management 

Organizations ready to address these challenges should consider strategic investments in advanced change capabilities. Prosci's advanced training and certification track offers a unique opportunity to elevate the skills your practitioners have gained since becoming a Prosci Certified Change Practitioner.  

Now, through Prosci’s Model Mastery programs, change practitioners can learn to tackle more complicated and complex change challenges. And those who complete all four programs can earn the Prosci Certified Advanced Change Practitioner (PCACP) designation. 

Building advanced capabilities in your practitioners delivers advanced skills that yield multiple returns for your organization, including: 

• Faster speed to value – Ready-to-use resources help your teams quickly and efficiently engage key stakeholders in change management activities. Improved cross-functional alignment also accelerates your change and business decision-making.  

• Greater focus on outcomes – Achieve results and outcomes for even the most complex change challenges—and clearly demonstrate a measurable connection between change activities and business results.  

• More productive collaboration – Strengthen partnerships among change teams, sponsors and senior leadership with solid metrics to rally around. As a result, you’ll connect with senior leaders on what matters most: ROI. 

• Stronger change leadership – Empower senior leaders and other stakeholders to effectively lead the people side of change. Building on existing change capabilities with advanced practitioners is especially impactful for supporting key business areas. 

In today's environment of continuous disruption, organizations can't afford to approach complex change without the right tools. Advanced change management isn't just a project enhancement—it's a strategic necessity for business success.