By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

There are as many different definitions of Change Management as there are change managers.

In his 2011 article in Forbes, Change Management vs. Change Leadership – What's the Difference?, John Kotter notes:

Prosci, an organization that focuses on Change Management research, defines Change Management (at https://www.prosci.com/change-management/definition/) as:

The Change Management Institute, an organization that promotes and develops the practice of Change Management, notes in Organisational Change Management Maturity (February 2012) that Change Management is:

The list goes on. Notice that all of the preceding definitions focus on Change Management as the management of organizational change. This book will help you drive change throughout your company. It is not designed to help you determine which changes should be made to a computer system, such as you would find in ITIL Change Management.

To ensure that we're all working with the same definition, for the purposes of this book, Change Management will be defined as:

You'll notice that in this definition, I don't list every activity and tool. This is because, depending on your project, the set of activities and tools you use may change. I also don't define the type of change. As noted in the Preface, although this book focuses on the implementation of an IT system, Change Management and the basic concepts and activities in this book can be applied to any kind of change your organization faces.

The last word I want to focus on in the definition is "success." For each project, you must define what success looks like in your organization. People can appear to adopt the respective change, but on closer examination, you find that the change actually failed. I've seen cases in companies where the following issues occurred:

In each of these situations, although the change was superficially adopted, the overall project was a failure.