Change Management

Change management, in the organizational sense, is about the people side of change rather than the technical delivery of it. Popular models include Prosci's ADKAR (Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement) and Kotter's 8-Step Process, both of which focus on building a case for change, communicating it clearly, training people on new ways of working, and reinforcing the change so it sticks rather than reverting once attention moves on. This is distinct from — but related to — ITIL's change enablement (sometimes still called 'IT change management'), which is a control process for authorizing and scheduling changes to IT systems. A project can execute a technically perfect system rollout that still fails because the organizational change management around it — training, communication, stakeholder buy-in — was neglected. See our [Change Enablement](/glossary/change-enablement) entry for the ITIL-specific process. Organizational change management is a core PMP® competency: PMI's exam content outline explicitly covers stakeholder engagement and managing resistance to change as part of the 'people' domain, and it's covered in depth in CertScope's PMP training alongside the technical planning tools.