Prosci Change Management Explained: ADKAR, the 3-Phase Process and When to Use It

Every organization has one: the shiny new system that went live on schedule, on budget, with a launch email and a slice of cake, and that people are still quietly working around six months later. Nobody objected. Nobody used it either.

That gap between "it launched" and "people actually work this way now" is what change management exists to close. Prosci's approach is one of the most widely used ways to do it. Here is what it is, how it works, and when it is worth using.

What is Prosci change management?

Prosci is a change management research and training organization. Its methodology is built on years of research into what makes organizational change succeed or fail. The core idea is simple: organizations don't change, people do. A restructure, a merger or a new ERP only delivers results when the individuals affected change how they work, one person at a time.

The methodology has two levels that fit together:

• The individual level: the ADKAR model, which describes what each person needs to make a change.
• The organizational level: the Prosci 3-Phase Process, which organizes the change management work across a project.

Think of it as the difference between knowing how one person learns to ride a bike and running a cycling program for an entire city. You need both, or you end up with a very nice bike lane and nobody on it.

The ADKAR model: five outcomes every person needs

ADKAR is an acronym for the five outcomes a person must reach, in order, to change successfully:

• Awareness of why the change is needed. Not just what is changing, but why now and what happens if nothing does.
• Desire to take part and support the change. This is a personal choice and cannot be mandated, only influenced.
• Knowledge of how to change: the new processes, tools, roles and behaviours.
• Ability to actually perform in the new way, which comes from practice, coaching and time, not just training.
• Reinforcement to make the change stick, so people don't drift back to the old way once attention moves on.

The practical power of ADKAR is diagnostic. When a change stalls, it usually stalls at a specific element. If a team keeps asking "why are we doing this?", the problem is Awareness, and more training (Knowledge) won't fix it. If people understand the change, agree with it, and still can't do it, the gap is Ability, and another town hall won't help. Matching the remedy to the gap saves a lot of wasted effort.

The Prosci 3-Phase Process

At the organizational level, Prosci structures change management work into three phases.

Phase 1: Prepare Approach

Define what success looks like, understand the impact of the change on each group of employees, and build the change management strategy and team. This is where you assess the size and nature of the change and the organization's readiness for it, and identify the sponsors who need to lead it visibly.

Phase 2: Manage Change

Turn the strategy into plans and put them into action: sponsorship, communication, coaching for people managers, training and resistance management. Crucially, this phase tracks how people are actually progressing through ADKAR and adapts the plan as it goes, rather than firing off the communications schedule and hoping.

Phase 3: Sustain Outcomes

Measure whether the change has been adopted and is delivering the expected results, reinforce it, and hand ownership to the business. This is the phase most organizations skip, usually because the project team has already been reassigned. It is also why so many changes quietly revert. Remember that new system from the introduction? This is the phase that would have saved it.

Why the people side gets underfunded

Project plans are good at the visible work: scope, schedule, budget, technology. The human transition is harder to see, so it tends to be treated as a communications task bolted on at the end. By then, resistance has already formed, managers haven't been prepared, and "go-live" is mistaken for "done."

Prosci's methodology integrates change management with project management from the start, so the people plan and the delivery plan are built together. In practice, this is the single biggest difference between changes that stick and changes that become cautionary tales at the next leadership offsite.

When should you use Prosci change management?

The methodology scales, but it earns its keep on changes that significantly affect how people do their jobs, for example:

• restructures, reorganizations and new operating models
• mergers, acquisitions and integrations
• ERP, HRIS and other system implementations
• new processes, policies or ways of working
• cultural or leadership transformations

For a small, low-impact change, a light version of the same thinking (who is affected, what do they need to know, who will they hear it from) is usually enough. For a major change in a mid-to-large organization, the structured approach pays for itself in adoption.

Bringing in a Prosci-certified practitioner

A Prosci-certified practitioner has been trained in the methodology and its tools, such as the ADKAR assessment, change impact analysis and sponsor roadmaps. Organizations typically bring one in to lead the people side of a major change, to coach sponsors and people managers, and to build internal change capability so the next change doesn't need outside help.

At Ojong People & Strategy Group in Calgary, Nelson Ojong is a Prosci Certified Change Practitioner and a PMP, which means the change plan and the project plan are designed together from day one. If you are preparing for a significant change and want the people side handled with the same rigour as the technical side, see how we approach change management or book a consultation.

After all, the cake at launch is optional. Adoption isn't.