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Every organization manages change constantly — new systems, restructured teams, updated processes, shifting strategies. Most of this change is managed informally: a project plan here, a few announcement emails there, training scheduled if there’s budget for it. The result is the well-documented failure rate of change initiatives — commonly cited between 60-70% — that has persisted for decades despite enormous investment in change management as a discipline.
A formal change management process exists to address this gap. It provides a structured, repeatable approach to moving people, teams, and organizations from a current state to a desired future state — one that explicitly addresses the human dimensions of change that informal approaches consistently neglect.
This guide walks through the change management process in depth, using the framework established by the ACMP Standard for Change Management — the professional standard developed by the Association of Change Management Professionals — while connecting it to other widely used process frameworks so you can apply whichever structure fits your organization’s context.
What is the Change Management Process?
The change management process is the structured sequence of activities an organization follows to plan, implement, and sustain a change — from initial assessment of the need for change through to embedding the new way of working as the new normal.
Unlike change management models — frameworks like Kotter’s 8 Steps, ADKAR, or Lewin’s Unfreeze-Change-Refreeze that provide conceptual approaches to change — the change management process is the operational sequence of activities that any change effort needs to move through, regardless of which model or methodology is guiding it. Think of models as the philosophy and process as the procedure. For a detailed look at the major models, see our guide to change management models.
The Five Process Groups of the Change Management Process
The ACMP Standard for Change Management organizes the change management process into five process groups. Unlike many popular models, these are not strictly sequential stages — they represent ongoing activity areas that interact and overlap throughout a change effort. This structure is valuable precisely because it reflects how change actually unfolds in organizations: messily, iteratively, and with constant feedback between planning and execution.
1. Evaluating Change Impact and Organizational Readiness
Before any change plan is built, the process begins with understanding two things: what the change will actually affect, and how ready the organization is to absorb it.
Impact assessment identifies who and what will be affected by the change — which roles, processes, systems, locations, and stakeholder groups. This is more involved than it sounds: a seemingly technical change (a new software system, for example) typically has cascading impacts on workforce structure, required skills, reporting relationships, and day-to-day workflows that aren’t visible until someone deliberately maps them.
Readiness assessment evaluates the organization’s current capacity to take on the change — including factors like change fatigue from recent initiatives, the strength of leadership sponsorship, existing trust levels between management and staff, and whether the organization has the skills and resources the change will require. A readiness assessment that surfaces low readiness isn’t a reason to abandon a change — but it is critical information for how the change should be sequenced, communicated, and supported.
The output of this process group is a clear picture of the scope of change required and the conditions the change effort will need to navigate — information that shapes every decision that follows.
2. Formulating the Change Management Strategy
With impact and readiness understood, the next process group defines the overall approach: how will this change be led, communicated, and supported given what we now know about its scope and the organization’s readiness for it?
Key activities in this process group include defining the change strategy and approach (will this be a phased rollout, a pilot-then-scale approach, or an all-at-once implementation?), identifying and securing sponsorship (who needs to visibly lead this change, and do they understand what that requires?), and establishing the governance structure that will oversee the change effort — who makes decisions, how progress is tracked, and how issues get escalated and resolved.
This is also where the change management strategy connects to the broader change model being used. An organization using Kotter’s framework would focus this stage on building the guiding coalition and creating urgency. An organization using ADKAR would focus on understanding what Awareness and Desire-building will require for the specific population affected. The process group is the same; the model shapes how it’s executed.
3. Developing the Change Management Plan
The change management plan translates strategy into specific, actionable activities across the dimensions that determine whether change is adopted: communication, training, and resistance management.
The communication plan defines what needs to be communicated, to whom, when, and through what channels — addressing not just the announcement of change but the ongoing communication needed throughout implementation. Effective communication plans address the questions affected people actually have: what’s changing, why, what it means for me specifically, and what happens next.
The training plan identifies the new skills, knowledge, or behaviors the change requires and how people will acquire them — not just initial training, but reinforcement and support as people apply new ways of working in practice.
The resistance management plan anticipates where resistance is likely to emerge — based on the impact and readiness assessments from the first process group — and defines how it will be addressed. Resistance is not a problem to be eliminated; it is information about where the change plan may be missing something important. A good resistance management plan treats resistance as a source of insight, not just an obstacle.
This is the stage where visual, collaborative planning tools — like the Change Planning Canvas™ — are most valuable, because they bring the people who will execute the plan into its development, surfacing risks and opportunities that a plan developed in isolation would miss.
4. Executing the Change Management Plan
Execution is where the plan meets reality — and where most change management processes either succeed or quietly start to fail. Effective execution requires three things operating simultaneously: delivering the communication, training, and resistance management activities as planned; monitoring adoption and engagement in real time, not just at predetermined checkpoints; and adapting the plan based on what’s actually happening, rather than rigidly executing a plan that early evidence suggests isn’t working.
The most common execution failure is treating the plan as fixed once approved. Change efforts that build in regular checkpoints — weekly or biweekly reviews of adoption data, informal feedback channels, and visible willingness from leadership to adjust the approach — consistently outperform those that execute a static plan regardless of what’s happening on the ground.
Execution also requires sustained sponsorship. Sponsors who are visible and active at the launch of a change effort but disappear during the harder middle phases — when initial enthusiasm has faded and the change hasn’t yet become routine — are one of the most common reasons change efforts stall.
5. Closing the Change Management Effort
The final process group is also the most frequently skipped — and its absence is a major reason why organizations don’t build lasting change management capability. Closing a change effort involves three activities: confirming that the change has been adopted and is being sustained without ongoing special support; capturing lessons learned — what worked, what didn’t, and what should be done differently next time; and formally transitioning ownership of the new way of working to the operational teams who will sustain it going forward.
Organizations that skip this process group tend to experience two problems repeatedly: changes that were “implemented” quietly revert to old ways of working once attention moves elsewhere, and each new change effort starts from scratch rather than building on what was learned from the last one. The closing process group is what turns individual change efforts into organizational change capability.
How This Maps to Other Common Process Frameworks
The five ACMP process groups aren’t the only way to structure the change management process — and you may encounter other frameworks in your organization. Here’s how they relate:
| ACMP Standard (5 process groups) |
Common 3-Phase Model |
APQC (4 steps) |
| Evaluating Change Impact and Readiness |
Current State |
Plan |
| Formulating the Change Management Strategy |
Design |
| Developing the Change Management Plan |
Transition State |
Implement |
| Executing the Change Management Plan |
| Closing the Change Management Effort |
Future State |
Sustain |
The structure you use matters less than ensuring all the underlying activities are genuinely addressed. A process with only 3 named phases that addresses all five ACMP process groups within those phases is functionally equivalent to one with 5 named stages. What matters is whether impact assessment, readiness assessment, strategy formulation, planning across communication/training/resistance, disciplined execution with monitoring, and formal closure are all genuinely happening — not what they’re called.
Why Following the Process Matters
Research consistently shows that organizations using a formal, structured change management process significantly outperform those that don’t — both in achieving the specific objectives of individual change efforts and in building the organizational capability to manage change repeatedly and well.
The reason is straightforward: each process group addresses a specific failure mode that informal change efforts consistently fall into. Skipping impact and readiness assessment means discovering mid-implementation that the change is more disruptive than anticipated. Skipping strategy formulation means executing tactics without a coherent approach. Skipping plan development means relying on ad-hoc communication and training that doesn’t address the specific resistance the organization will face. Skipping disciplined execution means plans that don’t adapt to reality. And skipping closure means changes that revert and lessons that are never captured.
A formal process doesn’t guarantee success — but it ensures that the most common, most predictable failure modes are deliberately addressed rather than left to chance.
Frequently Asked Questions About the Change Management Process
What are the steps in the change management process?
The ACMP Standard for Change Management organizes the change management process into five process groups: evaluating change impact and organizational readiness, formulating the change management strategy, developing the change management plan (covering communication, training, and resistance management), executing the change management plan with ongoing monitoring and adaptation, and closing the change management effort by confirming adoption, capturing lessons learned, and transitioning ownership to operational teams. Other frameworks describe similar activities using 3 to 7 steps — what matters is that all of these underlying activities are addressed, regardless of how many named stages a particular framework uses.
What is the difference between a change management process and a change management model?
A change management model is a conceptual framework or philosophy for approaching change — examples include Kotter’s 8-Step Model, ADKAR, and Lewin’s Unfreeze-Change-Refreeze model. A change management process is the operational sequence of activities — impact assessment, strategy formulation, planning, execution, and closure — that any change effort needs to move through, regardless of which model is guiding it. Models shape how each process step is approached; the process defines what steps need to happen. Most organizations select a model (or combination of models) and apply it within a structured process.
Why do change management processes fail?
Change management processes most commonly fail when one or more process groups are skipped or under-resourced. Skipping impact and readiness assessment leads to underestimating disruption. Skipping strategy formulation leads to uncoordinated tactics. Skipping plan development leads to inadequate communication, training, and resistance management. Treating execution as fixed rather than adaptive means plans that don’t respond to what’s actually happening. And skipping the closing process group — confirming adoption, capturing lessons, and transitioning ownership — means changes that quietly revert and organizational learning that never accumulates. The most resilient change management processes treat all five process groups as ongoing, interacting activities rather than a simple linear checklist.
Who is responsible for the change management process?
Responsibility for the change management process is typically shared between a change sponsor (usually a senior leader who provides visible support and authority for the change), a change manager or change management team (responsible for designing and executing the process itself), and the managers and supervisors of affected employees (who deliver much of the day-to-day communication and support that determines whether change is adopted). Sustained sponsorship throughout the entire process — not just at launch — is consistently identified as one of the most important factors in successful change management.
How long does the change management process take?
The duration of the change management process depends heavily on the scope of the change and the organization’s readiness. Small, well-scoped changes affecting a single team might move through all five process groups in a matter of weeks. Large-scale organizational transformations affecting multiple departments, systems, and ways of working can take many months to years — particularly when the closing process group, which includes confirming sustained adoption, is given the time it requires. A common mistake is underestimating the time needed for the closing process group specifically — organizations often declare a change “complete” once new systems or processes are technically in place, without confirming that new behaviors have actually become the sustained new normal.
Put This Into Practice With the Change Planning Toolkit™
The frameworks in this article are part of the Human-Centered Change™ methodology — a visual, collaborative system of 70+ tools built around the Change Planning Canvas™. Every copy of Charting Change gives you access to 26 of the 70+ tools.
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