Agile is all the rage at the moment in driving change and transformation. Many call out the importance of stakeholder management, communicating regularly, ensuring strong sponsorship, and clarity of business requirements. Others emphasize the need to have continual people interactions versus documentation and processes. For the uninitiated all of these seem to make sense, but yet not that different compared to using other methodologies in other projects. Agile methodologies have emerged as the catalysts for change and transformation. Anchored by principles such as stakeholder engagement, transparent communication, and robust sponsorship, Agile’s true essence lies in its unique approach – the rapid release of incremental changes, fostering a culture of continual learning and adaptability.
One of the key tenets of agile involves releasing a series of smaller changes rapidly, learning and adjusting from each release, rather than spending a longer time to work on a much bigger release that may or may not be successful.
However, releasing a series of changes can be unsettling, disruptive, and hard to keep up for employees. This is especially the case for larger programs when the timeline could go for more than 1 year. Combining several programs, you can imagine the unsettling rather of these changes on employees and the business.
How do we resolve this? The key is to provide a strong picture of the end state and how things will look like and set the expectation that there will be a series of changes, providing examples of these as well as explaining why this is an effective way to drive change. Yes, We may not know exactly the details of the end state, but the business should be clear in the overall outcomes and key works to get there.
To do this effectively we need to be able to connect the dots and tell the story of the journey of change and how the different changes connect to lead us to the end state. Sounds simple? Yet lots of companies are not able to reach this outcome due to a big pipeline of changes.
Illustrating the Power of Digital Connectivity
Agile in Software Development: Consider a software development project embracing Agile principles. Instead of the traditional monolithic release after months of development, Agile allows teams to deliver functional components regularly. Users gain hands-on experience early, providing invaluable feedback for immediate adjustments.
Navigating Business Transformation: In a complex business transformation, Agile’s iterative approach proves invaluable. Imagine a company implementing a new customer relationship management (CRM) system. Agile permits incremental updates based on user feedback, ensuring the CRM aligns seamlessly with evolving business needs.
Strategic Resource Allocation: A company grappling with a pipeline of diverse changes faces challenges in maintaining clarity. Digital tools, like ‘The Change Compass,’ offer a panoramic view, enabling leaders to visualize the interconnectedness of initiatives. This facilitates strategic decision-making and precise resource allocation.
Employee-Centric Transformations: Consider an organization rolling out changes to internal workflows. Agile, supported by digital tools, empowers leaders to communicate phased changes effectively. This ensures employees not only understand the bigger picture but also feel more engaged in the transformation process.
The solution? Use digital means to connect the dots and not rely on personal interpretation. Use a digital tool to examine what is coming down the pipeline, and therefore create meaning and better prioritize initiatives to move the business forward. By seamlessly weaving Agile methodologies into their fabric and harnessing the power of tools such as ‘The Change Compass,’ organizations adeptly steer through the ever-evolving landscape of perpetual change. Serving as a strategic guide, ‘The Change Compass’ leverages analytics and machine learning to streamline change orchestration, prioritize initiatives, and guide organizations with precision and confidence toward their transformation targets. This approach cultivates a work environment characterized by transparency, adaptability, and active engagement. As a result, the journey toward the end state transforms into a seamlessly connected narrative of continual progress and sustainable growth.
In 2015, the Change Management Institute published its Employment and Salary Survey for the Australian market. Buried in the data was a figure that should have sparked genuine debate in the profession: 77 per cent of change management roles in Australia were held by contractors. Not permanent employees. Not internal capability. Contractors brought in for a project, then gone. A decade later, that structural reality has barely shifted, and it raises a question that the Australian change management community has been reluctant to ask directly: does the way we resource change management actually undermine our ability to get better at it?
This is not a critique of individual contractors, many of whom are highly skilled and deeply experienced. It is a critique of the model. When three out of four change management practitioners are hired on a transactional basis, it tells you something important about how organisations perceive the discipline. Not as a core competency to be developed and retained, but as a specialist service to be procured when needed and released when the project closes. The implications of that perception are more significant than they might first appear.
Compare that posture with companies consistently ranked among the world’s most admired: Intel, Apple, Microsoft, Johnson and Johnson. These organisations do not treat change capability as something you rent. They build it into the operating rhythm of the business, into the expectations of line managers, into leadership development frameworks that persist across years and cycles. The gap between how Australian organisations approach change and how these companies approach it is not a gap in methodology. It is a gap in philosophy. And until we examine that gap honestly, we will keep importing contractors, running projects, and wondering why organisational resilience to change remains stubbornly low.
What the 77% contractor figure reveals
Numbers like this are easy to read as a simple market dynamic: change management is project work, so it attracts project-based resourcing. That explanation is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The more revealing question is why Australian organisations have not followed the same trajectory as, say, project management or business analysis, disciplines that began in a similar place and have steadily moved toward embedded internal capability. Most large Australian organisations now carry permanent project managers and business analysts on their payroll as a matter of course. Change management has not made that transition at the same rate, and the reason is not purely structural.
The underlying issue is that change management in Australia has largely been positioned as a deliverable, not a discipline. A contractor arrives with their change management plan, their stakeholder map, their communications calendar. They execute. They leave. The outputs exist but the learning does not transfer. The next project starts from scratch because the person who holds the knowledge is no longer there. This is not a failure of individual practitioners. It is a systemic failure of how organisations think about the relationship between change and capability.
McKinsey’s 2023 research on perpetual organisational upheaval surveyed 2,500 business leaders across Asia, Europe and North America and found that only about half said their organisations were well prepared for the change needed. In Australia, where the dominant model essentially resets change capability at the end of every project cycle, that readiness problem is structural, not incidental. You cannot build preparedness for an era of continuous change by repeatedly starting from zero.
The transactional model and its limitations
The contractor model offers genuine advantages that are worth acknowledging. It provides flexibility in a labour market where demand for change capability is uneven. It gives organisations access to specialists who have worked across multiple industries and can bring cross-pollinated insights. For a one-off, time-bounded transformation with a clear end date, it can be entirely appropriate. The problem arises when this model becomes the default rather than the exception, when it is applied not because it is the right tool for the situation but because the organisation has never seriously considered building the alternative.
The deeper limitation of the transactional model is what it does to learning. Every major change initiative generates knowledge, what worked in this organisation, what the stakeholder landscape looks like, which leaders are genuine sponsors and which are performative ones, where the cultural fault lines sit. In an embedded model, that knowledge accumulates. It becomes organisational memory. In a contractor model, it walks out the door. The next programme begins without the benefit of what the last one taught, and the organisation pays the same learning costs repeatedly without ever banking the returns.
There is also a question of accountability. A contractor’s primary obligation is to deliver the defined scope of work within the engagement period. That is not a moral failing; it is the nature of the contract. But genuine change capability requires something more than scope delivery. It requires ownership of outcomes that extend beyond the project close date, the willingness to be held accountable for whether change actually landed in the organisation, not just whether the plan was executed. That kind of accountability is structurally difficult when the person responsible for change has already moved on to their next engagement.
Gartner’s 2026 research on change management trends for CHROs found that organisations that continuously or regularly adapt change plans based on employee responses are four times more likely to achieve change success. Continuous adaptation requires continuity of presence. You cannot adapt intelligently to what you are no longer around to observe.
How globally admired companies approach change capability
Intel’s approach to change management has been studied extensively in organisational behaviour literature, and what makes it distinctive is precisely what makes it unfamiliar to most Australian practitioners. Rather than deploying specialist change resources on a project-by-project basis, Intel invested heavily in building change capability into the management layer itself. Line managers were trained and held accountable for managing the people-side of change as part of their standard operating responsibilities. Change was not something that happened to the business while the managers watched from the side. It was something managers were expected to lead, with support from a smaller internal centre of excellence that provided tools, coaching and frameworks.
This model is harder to stand up. It requires patient investment in manager capability, clear accountability frameworks, and the organisational will to hold leaders to behavioural standards that are harder to measure than project delivery. But the return is compounding. Each change cycle builds on the last, managers become more skilled, resistance patterns become better understood, and the organisation develops a genuine immune response to the failure modes that derail most transformations.
Microsoft’s cultural transformation under Satya Nadella is another instructive case. The shift from a “know it all” to a “learn it all” culture was not delivered by a fleet of external change contractors. It was driven through a sustained internal effort to change how leaders led, embedding a growth mindset into performance management, development conversations and the day-to-day operating model. Johnson and Johnson similarly integrates change thinking into its leadership development architecture, treating the ability to lead people through change as a core leadership competency rather than a specialist skill reserved for a separate function.
Apple’s approach is characteristically opaque, but its structural signature is visible: extraordinarily tight integration between product, operations and people strategy, with change absorbed into the operating model rather than managed as a separate workstream. The common thread across all of these companies is a refusal to treat change as an episodic challenge requiring episodic resourcing. They treat it as a permanent condition requiring permanent capability.
The case for the embedded change model
The embedded model does not mean eliminating external expertise. It means changing its role. In a mature embedded model, external practitioners might be brought in to support particularly complex or novel transformations, to provide specialist coaching, or to help build internal capability during a transition period. What they are not doing is substituting for internal capability that should exist but does not. The centre of gravity sits inside the organisation, not outside it.
Prosci’s Change Management Maturity Model, which assesses organisations across five levels from ad hoc practice to organisational competency, makes the distinction clearly. At the higher maturity levels, change management is not a project function but an organisational one. It is integrated into governance, into leadership expectations, into the way programmes are structured from the outset. Crucially, Prosci’s Best Practices in Change Management research (12th edition) found that projects with excellent change management are up to seven times more likely to achieve their objectives. The question is not whether embedded capability is worth building. The question is why more Australian organisations have not built it.
Part of the answer is short-termism. The contractor model is visible and immediate: you need change support, you hire a contractor, the invoice is paid, the project closes. The costs of not building internal capability are diffuse and deferred. You see them in transformation fatigue, in repeated change failures, in the organisation’s growing resistance to the next initiative, in the senior leaders who have stopped believing that large-scale change is achievable. Those costs are real but they rarely appear on a project budget. They appear in culture surveys, in engagement scores, in strategy execution data, and in the quiet exodus of talented people who simply cannot sustain another poorly managed transition.
What the shift from contractor to embedded capability requires
Moving from a predominantly contractor model to a genuinely embedded one is not a quick transition, and it would be misleading to suggest it is simply a matter of converting contract headcount to permanent headcount. The structural shift is necessary but not sufficient. Alongside it, organisations need to make four interconnected moves.
The first is leadership commitment that goes beyond rhetoric. Embedding change capability means holding line managers accountable for people outcomes during transitions, not just delivery milestones. That requires executive sponsors who are willing to tie performance expectations to change leadership behaviours and to maintain that accountability when the pressure to deliver is highest.
The second is investment in change literacy across the management population. This is not about turning every manager into a certified change practitioner. It is about giving managers enough understanding of how people respond to change, what resistance signals, and what effective sponsorship looks like that they can play their role intelligently. McKinsey research on successful transformations found that among initiatives that failed to engage line managers, only 3 per cent of respondents reported success. The management layer is not peripheral to change. It is the primary mechanism through which change either takes hold or fails.
The third move is building a smaller but highly skilled internal change function that acts as a centre of excellence, setting standards, coaching managers, maintaining tools and frameworks, and keeping organisational learning alive between initiatives. This function is not a delivery team. It is a capability infrastructure.
The fourth, and perhaps most overlooked, is establishing the organisational processes that allow change capability to compound over time. That means after-action reviews that are genuinely analytical rather than performative, change impact lessons that are captured and reused, and a structured way of passing organisational knowledge from one initiative to the next. None of this happens automatically. It requires deliberate design and consistent commitment from leadership.
The role of data and measurement in enabling embedded capability
One of the less obvious reasons the contractor model persists is that organisations lack the data infrastructure to make the embedded model credible. When you cannot measure your organisation’s current change load, you cannot make a coherent case for why permanent change capability is needed. When you cannot track adoption rates across initiatives, you cannot demonstrate the value of the capability you are building. When each project operates in its own data silo, you cannot learn systematically from what has come before. Data poverty makes the case for embedded capability invisible.
The organisations that have successfully built embedded change capability share a common characteristic: they invest seriously in measurement. They track not just delivery outputs, which are the traditional domain of project management, but people outcomes. How many employees are aware of the change? How many understand what it means for their role? How many are actively adopting the new ways of working? How does the current change load compare to what this part of the organisation has absorbed before, and is it approaching a saturation point that will cause the next initiative to fail regardless of how well it is managed?
These are not exotic questions. They are basic questions that any organisation genuinely invested in change capability should be able to answer. But without the measurement infrastructure to surface the answers, they remain rhetorical. And when the answers are rhetorical, the conversation about change management defaults to anecdote and instinct, which is precisely the environment in which the contractor model thrives, because anecdote cannot distinguish between a capable contractor and a capable internal function.
How The Change Compass supports organisation-owned change maturity
The Change Compass is built on the premise that organisations cannot manage what they cannot see. Its core function is to give internal change teams and senior leaders a real-time view of the change portfolio across the organisation: what is happening, where, at what pace, and with what cumulative impact on the people being asked to absorb it. This kind of portfolio visibility is foundational to the embedded model, because it makes the case for change capability in a language that senior leaders and finance functions understand. It turns a qualitative argument about organisational resilience into a quantitative picture of change load, adoption progress and risk.
For organisations making the transition from a contractor-heavy model to a more embedded one, The Change Compass provides the data layer that internal capability needs to function credibly. It allows change practitioners within the organisation to track adoption across initiatives, identify where employee capacity is being exceeded before failure becomes visible, and demonstrate the cumulative value of sustained investment in people-led change. It also creates the institutional memory that the contractor model destroys: because data lives in the platform rather than in an individual’s head, the knowledge does not leave when the project closes. That is not a minor feature. It is the difference between an organisation that learns from change and one that keeps relearning the same lessons at the same cost.
Frequently asked questions
Is it ever appropriate to use contractors for change management?
Yes, and this article is not arguing otherwise. External contractors bring genuine value in specific circumstances: highly complex or novel transformations where specialist expertise is scarce internally, surge periods where the volume of change exceeds internal capacity, or capability-building engagements where an external practitioner is helping to develop internal skills. The problem arises when the contractor model is the default rather than a deliberate choice, particularly when it substitutes for internal capability that the organisation should be building and retaining over time.
What does “embedded change capability” actually mean in practice?
It means that the knowledge, skills and accountability for managing the people-side of change are distributed across the organisation rather than concentrated in external specialists brought in on a project basis. In practice, this includes line managers who understand how to lead their teams through transitions, a small internal centre of excellence that maintains standards and tools, leadership behaviours that model and reinforce change management as a core competency, and measurement systems that allow the organisation to learn across initiative cycles rather than starting from scratch each time.
How long does it take to build genuine internal change capability?
There is no universal answer, but organisations that have made this transition successfully tend to describe a multi-year journey rather than a programme with a defined end date. Early stages typically focus on establishing a small internal team, introducing measurement infrastructure, and building change literacy into the management population. Maturity develops as the discipline becomes integrated into governance processes, leadership expectations and programme design from the outset. Prosci’s maturity model research suggests that reaching the higher levels of organisational competency typically requires sustained commitment over three to five years, with visible returns beginning to accumulate well before that milestone.
Why has Australia been slower than other markets to adopt embedded change models?
Several factors are likely at play. Australia’s relatively small population and geographically dispersed business environment have historically made it easier to access a deep pool of contract practitioners than to build internal pipelines. Short-term budget cycles and a strong project management culture that separates delivery from ongoing operations have also reinforced the transactional model. There is also a cultural dimension: Australian organisations have tended to be pragmatic and risk-averse in their investment decisions, which makes the long-term, compounding return of embedded capability harder to justify against the immediate, visible cost of a contractor engagement. Changing this will require leaders who are willing to make the case for long-term capability investment in a business environment that more readily rewards short-term delivery.
What are the key benefits of best practice change management process in an organization?
Effective change management enhances organizational change management agility, boosts employee engagement, maximises change efforts and minimizes resistance to change. This can apply to digital transformations or other types of significant changes. It fosters a culture of adaptability to new business processes, ensuring that teams can navigate transitions smoothly. Ultimately, it leads to improved productivity, better communication, and higher overall satisfaction among employees and stakeholders alike, driving long-term success.
In the corporate world, most approaches in defining the business value of change involve hard benefits such as revenue, cost, and time. For example, increased revenue per customer, reduced people costs, and improvement in processing time. Yes, there are non-financial benefits such as capability improvement and strategic alignment. However, in practice, most tend to focus more on hard benefits that are more tangible and easier to track.
The problem is that benefits are usually defined in a top-down, linear way and have not taken into account the environment that determines the benefits. For example, a Strategy department defines the need to cut people costs by 10% and therefore the analysis will subsequently focus on headcount reduction or pay and benefits reduction. Finance will therefore work with HR and the business to start defining which headcounts to cut and any opportunities to reduce pay and benefits. A list is then gathered to report on potential cost savings in dollar terms.
What is wrong with this scenario of defining benefits for organisational change?
On paper, everything looks fine, but without actually involving those managers in business and understanding the environment in which the costs will be saved it is hard to determine the actual benefits. How much influence do these roles have on the organization from lateral networking and influencing perspective? Can any of these roles be critical in implementing the change process? What are the potential impacts in service delivery resulting from these cuts? The learning here is that top-down analysis of benefits can often only be treated as high level and we need to work within the organization to find out the real benefits.
In a previous role, an IT department wanted to reduce the $25 per call for employees to change their passwords. When I started finding out more about the experience and the process for an employee to change passwords the discovery I made was quite shocking from an employee morale perspective. The $25 was negligible compared to the real cost. For example, my team member Barbra just returned from maternity leave and had forgotten her login password. She rang the Helpdesk 4 times to try and retrieve her password but was unsuccessful for some reason. Barbara became increasingly irate. We’ve heard her screaming at the phone, taking breaks to calm down, and talking to others to express her frustration. For days she was not able to log on. For Barbara’s case, the company has lost the equivalent of 3 days in productivity to the tune of $2500. We’ve also found other similar cases.
So how might we better analyse and assess the benefits of change initiatives?
Change management professionals can do this by observing the environment for those impacted by the change initiative, or the employee or customer experience. Utilise human-centred approaches in observing the employee or the customer and how the initiatives may impact their lives. These include observation of key stakeholders as a part of the overall change program, seeing the whole picture by putting yourself into their shoes, identifying the impacts on various people and processes, and if needed interviewing them after observation to find out more. What else will be happening in their worlds other than the change initiative in concern? Will there be risks of overlaps or time conflicts for different initiatives?
Change managers can tally various sources of benefits observed. Who are the people potentially impacted by the change initiative? What processes and systems are impacted by the new technology or new software? Therefore, what are the sources of potential benefits in terms of time, cost, or revenue? Have a chat with your business leaders to confirm on these.
Test change initiative and benefits before large-scale rollout
As a part of the change management practices, test at a smaller scale initial change implementation approaches on the selected target audience and observe the effects of change and resulting benefits. Take an proactive approach to experiment and tweak these approaches before larger-scale implementation.
What are the key benefits of effective change management in an organization?
Effective change management enhances organizational agility, improves employee engagement, and boosts productivity. It minimizes resistance to change by fostering clear communication and support, leading to smoother transitions and minimise unrealized benefits. Ultimately, these benefits contribute to sustained growth and a competitive edge in today’s rapidly evolving business landscape.
In the new digital world, we are all about using technology and the web to make our lives easier, more productive, and efficient. However, in the change management world, there is not a lot of tools out there to help us become leaner and more effective in managing change. A lot of other functions and disciplines have a range of digital tools to help them become more effective, but the same range of change management software is not yet available for change practitioners.
Why do we need software to manage change impacts?
In large companies, most departments are siloed and therefore it is difficult to get one integrated view of all changes
As the pace of change increases many companies are finding it simply too complex to try and manage change using spreadsheets. Change initiative information, like any data, becomes redundant very quickly therefore we need technology tools to help keep the data current.
Change impact information is critical for operational resource planning and managing customer experience. Constant and relevant data is required. Without a view of all the change impacts, including those deemed projects, improvement initiatives, Six Sigma, cultural change, product launches it is hard for us to see what changes are going to happen.
Often we are making business change decisions based on opinions and with the right software we can ensure that we are using data to make decisions
What are some of the existing offerings?
A quick search through the posts and articles in this Linkedin group has surfaced mostly with technical change management tools. There are lots of tools that focus on digital engagement, social networks, and collaboration. These include Pinipa, Sharepoint, and Change Scout. And others focus on Training such as WalkMe.
What is the current gap?
Most companies have data on typical project information such as cost and timeline. However, what we need is information on the nature of the change impact on employees and customers, e.g. what type of change, the quantum of change, when, in what location, and who are impacted.
The Change Compass provides a solution for companies undergoing multiple changes to have an integrated view of change impacts and guides business leaders to make the right data-based decisions.
As change practitioners, we often hear that Change is intangible and hard to measure – A key concern with change management metrics. As a result, the discipline is often perceived as less value-adding and less critical to the business and program performance. We work with technical, finance, process, and operations specialists who often do not get what we are on about.
In Michael Tushman’s Harvard Business Review article about change management he asserted that change management must become more data-driven to keep up with business demands. Otherwise, change management will no longer contribute critical value to the organisation that it should, and instead, risk being overlooked.
A typical scenario that Change practitioners often complain about is that they are in a typical project meeting where everyone is consumed with technical defects, testing data, project cost, and delivery resource requirements. From an analytics and reporting perspective, I often hear how hard it is to highlight and position the importance of Change data. But, as a part of Change delivery, we do produce various data to track progress. Why are we still not able to be at the centre of the table?
The problem is that most of the data we produce is data that is not positioned to link strongly to ultimate business outcomes. For example:
Employee feedback
Employee opinions are useful and insightful, however, this often reflects what stakeholders already suspected.
Change readiness surveys
Again, potentially useful and insightful. But, is agreeing to the statements in the survey equivalent to actual behavior change? (i.e. knowing vs doing) Does positive survey results guarantee business impact and full benefits realized.
Training completion rates
Training completion rates may be a minimum requirement to ensure the knowledge transfer has happened. However, will the behavior change? What is the impact on the operations?
What else to focus on measuring?
What we need is to focus on the critical business outcomes and be able to demonstrate how change management data provides leading indicators to:
1) the likelihood of realizing initiative benefits, and
2) impact on the business.
For example, if an organization is focused on improving customer experience, then we need to demonstrate how initiatives could impact their experience. Firstly, we need to work out to what extent the customer cares about the effects of the initiative, the magnitude of the impacts on customers, and whether the impacts are positive or negative (from the perspective of the customer).
With our understanding of employee and stakeholder readiness and adoption levels, these can be turned into the extent to which benefits may be realised. Any potential blockers in terms of adoption progress and sentiments may be utilised as an indication for benefit realisation.
Example of setting up a Change dashboard from Change Automator
In these ways, we have demonstrated the importance of managing change impacts over the timeline since any increase or decrease in customer experience could equate to hundreds of millions of dollars (according to Forrester research). Suddenly, we are now talking about top-line revenue impacts that will put us in the centre of attention. What has been your experience in linking change data to business results?
