Why we measure success in Change Management

A massively major part of Change Management is not the communications, not the training, not even the business readiness, support, embed, handover or stakeholder management. 

It’s measuring success. And so often, this crucial, critical part of Change is ignored and forgotten for the shiny object of change going live.

Change = People x Results

I love to define things really simply and I define Change Management as “moving people from one way of doing something to a new way of doing something through communications, training and business, in order to realise the business benefits of the change.” It’s not just for the sake of moving them and it's not just for the sake of people, it’s always to realise the business benefits. Change is not one-sided, it's not purely focused on people, there's an equal balance with results.

It's not one or the other, because what's the point of doing all of this change if you're not actually realising the business benefits off the back of it? 

Benefits realisation as a discipline

Benefits Realisation is actually a skill set in and of itself, there are roles out there occasionally called things like “Benefits Realisation Managers”. You might actually have somebody working in your change, project or team whose sole focus is “benefits realisation”. But what does it mean? Put simply, it means achieving the results in the short- and the long-term that you said that you would. So both the: 

- short-term results – i.e. at launch or directly after launch; and,

- long-term results - i.e. what was in the business case originally as to why the business wanted to do this change? 

It's not just the short-term results of the change and the results of launch where Change Management really can support a project, it's also then realising those benefits over time usually to add something that usually gets missed.

Measuring beyond launch

Projects have a very strong reputation of: 

- launching and leaving

- setting and forgetting

- delivering and disappearing. 

So many projects focus on just getting it out the door, delivering the thing, and then walking away. I've worked on projects where I have literally left the project two weeks after we launched. I've worked on projects where I know that the project continued on without me, and people were moving off the project *before* it even launched!!!

Feeling good isn’t enough

Benefits realisation is such a big factor of Change Management because in Change we're always trying to realise the business benefits. We're not just trying to make people feel good, we're trying to actually get that equal business outcome off the back of it, the return on investment, the long term growth and/or saving, the improvement to customer and team experience, the expansion of culture. But the project often doesn’t hang around long enough to do that. From a Change perspective, we want to make sure it’s set up for success. People feeling good is going to help you get that business outcome, but essentially and maybe even more importantly, we want to make sure we’re achieving the results in the short- and long-term that we said we would.

I cover what we measure, the tools we use to measure, the lag and lead tools you can use, and my favourite change metrics in Module 5: Measuring Success and Embed of my Leading Successful Change program. I’ll be running a bonus End of Year Coaching Call for my LSC students on Wednesday 3 December - if you’d like to join us to reflect on the year, set yourself up for success in 2026, and ask your questions about measuring success and anything else Change- or Career-related, register for the program today:

>> Register for Leading Successful Change and join the bonus of End of Year Coaching Call here

Lata xx