LA Global Institute Change guide · By LA Strategy Institute · Published November 4, 2026
A change management plan is the written plan for the people side of one change: for each group it touches, what changes, who tells them and when, how they are trained, how their concerns come back, and how adoption is measured. It matters more as willingness falls: in Gartner's survey, the share of employees willing to support organizational change fell from 74% in 2016 to 38%.
Short answers
The project delivers the new system, structure or process. The change management plan makes sure the people who must use it can, will, and keep doing so after the project team has moved on.
A change management plan is the written plan for the people side of one change. For every group the change touches, it says what changes for them, who tells them and when, how they are trained and supported, how their concerns come back, and how anyone will know they have adopted the new way of working. It runs from the announcement to the point where the change is owned by the line.
In Prosci's 3-Phase Process the strategy comes first: it is the deliverable of the Prepare Approach phase, which defines success, impact and approach. The plan comes second: the Master Change Management Plan is the deliverable of the Manage Change phase, with detailed plans such as communications, training and sponsor plans inside it.
The project plan delivers the solution: the system configured, the structure approved, the process written. The change management plan delivers its use: the people who must work differently doing so. A project can finish on time while nobody uses what it built. The two plans share dates, not owners.
The communication plan is one part of the change management plan. It covers messages, senders, channels and dates. The change management plan also covers impact, readiness, roles, training, resistance and feedback, measures, and the handover. A plan that is only a calendar of announcements tells people about the change without helping them make it.
A change lead holds the pen and the sponsor signs it, but each affected group should plan its own part. Gartner reports that change success increases by 24% when employees primarily own implementation planning, and by 15% when they are involved in decision making.
The numbers
Each figure links to the page it was read from, and each carries its source and year where the source gives one. Five come from Gartner research, one from Prosci, and one from a peer-reviewed review of the most quoted failure figure. None is a client result.
of employees were willing to support organizational change: 74% in 2016, and 38% in the later Gartner survey reported in November 2022.
Gartner, 2022planned enterprise changes for the average employee in 2022, up from two in 2016, according to Gartner research.
Harvard Business Review, 2023increase in change success when employees primarily own implementation planning, instead of leaders deciding how plans are implemented.
Gartner, 2022increase in change success from involving employees in decision making.
Gartner, 2022of employees intend to stay: 43% of those with above-average change fatigue, against 74% of those with low fatigue.
Gartner, 2022of organizations give the responsibility for reinforcing and sustaining a change to the manager of the impacted group.
Proscipublished instances of a 70 per cent change failure rate that Mark Hughes reviewed lacked valid and reliable empirical evidence for the figure.
Journal of Change Management, 2011What it contains
Most guides list goals, communication, training and a timeline. Those are here. So are the parts plans usually skip: impact and readiness by group, the managers' role, a route for concerns to come back, a measure of adoption, and the handover.
From what, to what, because of what. Gartner's example template for teams starts with the same three things: the from-to, the because, and the desired outcome.
Could every manager repeat it the same way?
Each group the change touches, and how much it changes for them, rated high, medium, low or none. This comes from a change impact assessment.
Who carries most of the change?
How ready each group is to make the change now, scored before the dates are set. This comes from a change readiness assessment.
Where will the plan meet the most friction?
One named sponsor, one change lead, and the people managers of every affected group. Prosci lists a sponsor plan and a people manager plan among its core role plans.
Who answers for adoption, by name?
What each group hears, from whom, in what order and through which channel. Managers hear first, so they can answer questions when their teams hear.
What does each group hear first, and from whom?
What each group must be able to do, how they learn it, and where they get help in the first weeks after go-live.
What must people be able to do on day one?
How concerns come back up, who reads them, and what is done with them. Gartner puts two-way conversation throughout the process among its three shifts.
How will we hear that it is not working?
One early measure and one result measure per group, defined before go-live, with the date each is read.
How will we know it stuck, and when?
Milestones tied to the project dates, the reinforcement after go-live, and the date ownership moves from the change team to the line.
Who owns the change once the project closes?
The method
Impact and readiness come before the dates, and the groups plan their own part before the calendar is fixed. The sequence is LA Strategy Institute's own. Where a step rests on published research, the source is named under Sources.
Owner: the sponsor. Output: one sentence that says what is changing, from what, to what, and why, plus the outcome it must produce. If the sponsor cannot write it, the plan is not ready to start; the decision behind the change is still open.
Owner: the change lead, with a representative from each group. Output: an impact rating per group. The change impact assessment on this site rates each group across ten dimensions, from processes and tools to workload. High-impact groups get the most of everything that follows.
Owner: the change lead. Output: a readiness score per group, taken before dates are fixed. A group that is highly affected and not ready is where the plan spends first, or where the date moves.
Owner: the sponsor. Output: a roles list with names. Prosci builds its core role plans around the sponsor and the people manager. Managers are the people employees ask, so their part is written down, not assumed.
Owner: each people manager, with their team. Output: each group's own do's and don'ts for its workflow, inside the plan's dates. Gartner reports a 24% increase in change success when employees primarily own implementation planning.
Owner: the change lead, with communications and training owners. Output: one row per group per milestone: what they hear and from whom, what they learn and how, and how their concerns come back. Managers are briefed before their teams.
Owner: the sponsor, with the line leaders who will own the change. Output: one early and one result measure per group, the dates they are read, the reinforcement after go-live, and the date ownership transfers. Prosci's third phase ends with transferring ownership.
Worked example
The target operating model guide follows an illustrative firm that pools scheduling, invoicing and complaints from its branches into one shared operations center, and the annual operating plan guide funds its first year. This is the people side of the same move, one row per affected group. It is a teaching example, not a client case.
| Group | Impact |
|---|---|
| Branch schedulers | High |
| Branch office managers | Medium |
| Field technicians | Low |
| Shared center staff | High |
| Finance team | Medium |
| Customers | Low |
Hears. From their branch manager, after the managers' briefing and before any announcement to customers.
Learns. Hands-on practice in the new scheduling system, plus a named contact in the center for the first weeks.
Measure. Early: share of the branch's jobs booked through the center. Result: days from customer request to booked visit.
Hears. From the sponsor, first, in a managers' briefing with questions answered before their teams hear.
Learns. How to read the center's queue for their branch, and the escalation route when a booking goes wrong.
Measure. Early: managers who have briefed their own teams by the agreed date. Result: escalations per week.
Hears. From their supervisor at the regular team meeting: who now books their visits, and what does not change.
Learns. Where to see the day's schedule and how to flag a problem with a booking.
Measure. Early: visits started on the booked time. Result: first-time fix rate, reported the same way as before.
Hears. From the head of operations, at hiring or transfer, with the branches they serve and the go-live order.
Learns. Scheduling, invoicing and complaint handling for every branch, practised before the first branch goes live.
Measure. Early: complaints logged in one place. Result: response time to complaints, measured from the center.
Hears. From the finance lead, once the invoicing date for each branch is set.
Learns. How invoices raised by the center reach the ledger, and how branch-level reports change.
Measure. Early: share of invoices raised by the center. Result: days from completed job to invoice sent.
Hears. From the branch they already know, with the new booking number, before the switch for that branch.
Learns. Nothing to learn beyond the new number; the visit itself stays with the branch.
Measure. Result: calls to the old branch number after the switch, falling week by week.
Reading the plan: two groups are high impact, so they get hands-on practice before go-live and the closest measures. The managers hear first, from the sponsor. Customers hear from the branch they already know. Every group has a measure, and each measure is one the firm already reports or can count, so adoption is read rather than assumed.
Seven things that get confused
Change meetings stall on words. Settle these before the plan is drafted. A published real plan helps too: the City of Portland's draft change management plan for its governance transition is organized in three parts: preparing for change, managing the change, and sustaining the change.
The people side of one change: impact, readiness, roles, communication, training, feedback, measures and handover. The subject of this page.
The approach before the plan: what success means, who is affected and how the change will be managed. In Prosci's process it is the deliverable of the first phase.
The tasks, budget and dates that deliver the solution. The change management plan uses its dates and adds what people need to use the solution.
Messages, senders, channels and dates. One part of the change management plan, not a substitute for it.
The input that says which groups change most. It comes before the plan.
The input that says which groups are ready now. It also comes before the plan.
A way to think about change, such as Kotter's 8 steps or Prosci's ADKAR. A model shapes the plan; it does not replace the plan's names, dates and measures.
Who owns what
A change plan fails quietly when everyone was informed and nobody was responsible for a group. Five roles carry it.
Where plans go wrong
None of these is a lack of effort. Each is a choice made while writing the plan, and each can be changed before the first announcement.
Before the plan is written, map the groups with the change impact assessment and score them with the change readiness assessment. Both run in the browser and store nothing.
Before the plan is written
An outside view helps when the change itself is still contested, when several changes are landing on the same groups, or when nobody inside can run the impact and readiness work without a stake in the answer. LA Strategy Institute's change management consulting starts with a bounded Market Opportunity Audit. It identifies the decisions, evidence gaps, operating constraints, and ownership questions that matter before a larger commitment. The exact scope is confirmed before work begins, and a typical audit is organized around the four decision artifacts below. The audit does not write your change management plan; it settles the decision and the owners the plan should start from. Anything after the audit is scoped after it, not before.
A concise record of what is verified, inferred, assumed, missing, protected, or actively at risk. For a change plan, it shows what is known about the groups before anyone rates them.
The small number of openings worth pursuing, the constraints that can prevent them from working, and the tradeoffs leadership must see. It shows whether this change should go first.
The decisions that cannot remain implicit, the owner for each next move, and the approval or evidence needed to proceed. It is the sponsor and roles list before the plan exists.
A practical first move and follow-up path organized around protection, shared blockers, measurable feedback, and responsible scale. It is the order the plan's milestones should follow.
Source boundary
Gartner's This New Strategy Could Be Your Ticket to Change Management Success (Jordan Turner, November 28, 2022) supplied the 74 and 38 percent willingness figures, the 43 and 74 percent intent-to-stay figures, the 24 and 15 percent increases in change success, the from-to and because template, and the three shifts. Harvard Business Review's Employees Are Losing Patience with Change Initiatives (Cian O Morain and Peter Aykens, May 9, 2023) supplied the 10 planned enterprise changes in 2022 against two in 2016. Prosci's Implementing Change Management Plan for Change Success supplied the 3-Phase Process, its deliverables, the core role plans and the 50 percent reinforcement figure. Mark Hughes's Do 70 Per Cent of All Organizational Change Initiatives Really Fail? (Journal of Change Management, 2011) supplied the review of the 70 per cent figure. Kotter's The 8 Steps for Leading Change supplied the first and last of Kotter's steps. The City of Portland's Draft Change Management Plan (version 2, September 14, 2023) supplied the published example's structure. The nine parts, the seven steps, the worked example and the stop rules are LA Strategy Institute's own. None of those authors or organizations created, reviewed, or endorsed this page.
Questions change leads ask
Nine parts: the change in one sentence, the affected groups and how much each is affected, readiness, the sponsor and roles, communication, training and support, feedback and resistance, adoption measures, and the timeline with reinforcement and the handover.
It depends on the model. Prosci's 3-Phase Process has three phases: prepare approach, manage change, and sustain outcomes. Kotter's 8 steps run from creating a sense of urgency to instituting change. The seven steps on this page are for writing the plan itself, and work with either model.
These are lists from different authors, not one agreed standard, so two sources can give different C's. Rather than choosing a list, check that the plan has the nine parts on this page, with a name and a date against each.
The strategy is the approach: what success looks like, who is affected, and how the change will be managed. The plan is the detail that carries it out: who hears what and when, who is trained, how concerns come back and how adoption is measured. In Prosci's process the strategy is the first phase's deliverable and the master plan is the second's.
A change lead holds the pen and the sponsor approves it, but each affected group should plan its own implementation. Gartner reports a 24% increase in change success when employees primarily own implementation planning.
No, on purpose. A template invites you to fill boxes before the groups, the impact and the readiness are known. The nine parts and the worked example show what a finished plan contains. For a published real plan, the City of Portland posted its draft governance transition change management plan, version 2, dated September 14, 2023.
By the adoption measures written into it before go-live: one early measure and one result measure per affected group, read on set dates. A plan worked when the result measures hold after the change team has handed ownership to the line.