Oct 28, 2025

The Change Management Imperative

There’s a scenario I’ve seen play out more times than I can count over my two decades leading digital transformations: a company spends millions on a new enterprise system and, by all technical measures, the go-live is a success—the plumbing is right, the integrations are running, data is validated, configurations and rollout goes well. Yet, a few months down the road, that same project is really struggling. And the reason is almost always the same. The promised value never materializes, not because the technology was flawed, but because the human component was never truly architected, revealing the hard truth that even with a highly successful migration the client can feel like the project is going very wrong or even running into a ditch if you haven't accounted for user adoption.

I remember back in the day when change management was often seen as fluffy. In fact, for many clients I worked with, it was a nice-to-have, something that wasn't always truly understood or even required. But that reality has fundamentally shifted. Today, the discipline has evolved from a support function into an absolute need, and that change is rooted in the simple fact that technical success and transformational success are two entirely different outcomes.

The Architecture of True Transformation

A technically successful implementation means the solution’s foundation and plumbing has been built correctly. A truly transformational success, on the other hand, is measured by what happens after go-live. It’s about limiting unproductivity, building an army of knowledgeable champions, and creating genuine advocacy that sustains the change for the long term. But achieving that kind of outcome requires an intentional architecture for the human side of the equation, and that entire structure must be built on the bedrock of genuine executive alignment.

This is why at Argano, our approach is to engineer that alignment through a formal process, which begins with surveys to distill the core guiding principles for the project, ensuring that when things get difficult, as they inevitably do, there is a north star to come back to. Once leaders see their individual perspectives reflected in that collective data, their commitment solidifies. From there, that partnership is maintained through a regular cadence of meetings and by embedding an executive on the change management team, providing an ear to the ground for the informal feedback that never makes it into a formal status report.

From Resistance to Advocacy: Building an Army of Champions

And having that vital feedback loop is essential, because in my experience, in order for a transformation to truly stick, the top-down alignment from leadership must be met with powerful, bottom-up momentum.

This is where the real work of building an internal army of advocates begins, and it requires its own deliberate, architectural approach.

Identify the Right People First: The process begins by looking for individuals who demonstrate natural leadership potential and are seen as positive, respected problem-solvers. These are the people their peers already turn to for guidance, which makes them the ideal conduits for change.
Define the Role, Not Just the Title: With these champions identified, the next step is to immediately frame their contribution. That’s why my team and I define the importance of their new role—which is very different from their title—making it clear that every position on a transformation is curated for success. Explaining that their "hat" as a change champion is critical to our collective outcome establishes a strong sense of purpose from the very beginning.
Empower Through Early Ownership: Once champions understand the "why" behind their role, true empowerment is unlocked by giving them a voice and the ability to make decisions. My strategy is to provide them with as much hands-on experience with the system as possible, as early as possible. This simple act accelerates their own adoption and, more importantly, transforms them into authentic owners of the solution, enabling them to support the broader user base with genuine confidence as they stop seeing it as just another corporate system and start making it their own.

Together, this framework is what turns potential resistance into active advocacy, creating a trusted network that can drive adoption from the ground up.

The Real ROI: Conquering the ‘Valley of Despair’

The business value of this intensive focus on the human component is directly tied to shortening what the industry calls the "valley of despair." This is the difficult and often painful period right after go-live when everyone is drinking from a firehose and productivity naturally dips. While this post-launch stabilization period is a predictable part of any major implementation, its duration and depth are not. The defining variable that minimizes this disruption is a well-architected change strategy, because it makes that valley dramatically shorter and shallower.

The reason this matters is that the length of that valley has a direct, measurable impact on the key operational metrics a business runs on, from fulfillment rates, on time shipments, production schedules to supplier and customer satisfaction. I’ve seen firsthand how companies take a significant hit for much longer than needed on these core KPIs when they fail to invest in change management, for the simple reason that their people cannot work as effectively for an extended period. Therefore, the faster you can drive adoption and shrink that ill-fated valley, the faster you can stabilize and ultimately exceed those benchmarks.

Change as a System, Not an Event

In the end, this work isn't just about a single implementation; it’s about building an organization’s capacity for change. The technical components of a project are finite, but the human element is ongoing. The frameworks for executive alignment and user advocacy are two sides of the same coin; one creates top-down commitment while the other builds bottom-up momentum. Together, they create a resilient structure that can withstand the pressures of any major transformation.

The ultimate goal is to morph a technical implementation into a story of business success, and that story is always about the people. So by treating the human side of modernization with the same architectural discipline as the technical side, we can ensure new solutions are not just implemented–they are fully adopted, embraced, and used to create the lasting business value they were designed to deliver.

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