Building a change capability from one role.
How a single change role, created out of an HR technology rollout, grew into an enterprise Change Management Office: one intake front door, a triage model that matched effort to impact, and an adoption standard the organization could count on.
FlightSafety International, a Berkshire Hathaway company: global aviation training and manufacturing
Lead, Organizational Change Management, reporting through the VP of Administrative Services to the Chief Administrative Officer
2022 – 2026, building on HR operations transformation work from 2020
About 30 enterprise-wide initiatives, each reaching 300 to 5,000 employees
The mandate
The role grew out of the enterprise HRIS rollout. Ken served as the business-side project manager and change lead, and built every training asset in-house because a learning and development function didn’t exist yet. The rollout showed what was missing: a repeatable way to prepare people for change across the enterprise, not one project at a time.
Ken made the case in a charter for a dedicated change function, and the organization created the role. The mandate: build an enterprise change discipline that connects Strategic Initiatives, where priorities are set, to the PMO, where they are delivered, and make adoption something leaders could plan for and measure.
What stood in the way
Many initiatives were landing on the same people at once, with little coordination between them.
Change management was new to the organization. The function had to prove its value before leaders would bring it in early.
Communication was sparse and inconsistent, and no one had a single view of what was changing, for whom, and when.
How it grew
Rather than launch everything at once, Ken grew the function in stages, earning trust at each step before taking on more.
Proved the model on the HR technology and process work where the role began.
Partnered with The Ohio State University to certify 46 employees as Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belts.
Extended change support across the enterprise portfolio, integrated with the PMO.
To win alignment, Ken borrowed from his procurement background: define the requirements with stakeholders first, build the business case, and make trade-offs visible. Leaders saw a disciplined process, not an extra layer.
From intake to handoff
Not every request needs a full change program. Requests came from Strategic Initiatives, the PMO, or department heads directly, and every one entered through the same front door. Each was routed by how deeply it would change the way people work, and every path ended the same way: with the business owning the change.
Many requests resolved as transitional: the business owned the change, with the change team consulting alongside.
Transformational initiatives then split by delivery model. Technology projects ran inside the PMO’s delivery plan, with change management embedded. On people- and process-only initiatives, the Change Management Office led the change work and coordinated delivery with business owners and the cross-functional team, keeping the plan, timeline, and risks visible.
Transformational work began 120 to 90 days before launch, with readiness reviews along the way and a formal gate at each milestone. A cross-functional team carried it: IT, HR, business owners, marketing, L&D, project management, communications, and outside suppliers and consultants.
Reaching 80% adoption at 90 days moved an initiative from active change support into monitoring, with ownership shared between the change team and process owners for up to a year. Process owners then took over the adoption dashboards, reinforcement plans, and workbooks. Change logs stayed centralized, so the enterprise kept one view of what was changing, for whom, and when.
When any measure fell short, the team found where, ran root-cause analysis, and corrected course. The usual gap was proficiency, closed with additional training or tools. On technology projects, readiness deadlines followed the PMO’s delivery plan; when the schedule moved, the change plan moved with it. Lessons learned from every initiative fed back into the playbook.
Each transformational stage maps to the DMAIC × ADKAR method below.
Over the life of the function, roughly 80 requests came through intake, and about 30 became enterprise-wide transformational initiatives.
Methods & toolkit
Discovery
Current-state process mapping, future-state design, 5-Whys root-cause analysis, and stakeholder goal mapping.
Assessment
Organizational, individual, leadership, and sponsorship assessments; surveys; readiness and adoption dashboards.
Leadership & enablement
Coaching for sponsors and leaders, a leader network, webinars, manager toolkits, and audience-specific communications. Multi-channel engagement matched to audience and depth of change: digital (intranet, digital displays), live (workshops, webinars, lunch-and-learns), and gamification built to move adoption, with knowledge quizzes that checked proficiency and team competitions that drove completion of required steps.
Network & capability
HR business partners trained as change champions alongside subject-matter experts; a team that started as direct reports and grew through dotted-line partners; and the Change Agility Maturity Model as the enterprise readiness standard.
DMAIC × ADKAR
Ken runs adoption the way Lean Six Sigma runs improvement. Each stage of DMAIC answers one question about the people side of change, so every step has a method, a measure, and an owner.
| DMAIC | ADKAR focus | The question | What happens | How it’s measured |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Define | Awareness | Why are we changing, and who does it affect? | Impact and stakeholder mapping; sponsor alignment on the case for change. | Stakeholder coverage; awareness pulse |
| Measure | Desire | Where do people stand today? | Readiness, sponsorship, and individual assessments; baseline surveys. | Baseline readiness score |
| Analyze | Knowledge | What stands between people and success? | Current-state mapping and 5-Whys on gaps and resistance. | Prioritized gaps and root causes |
| Improve | Ability | What will help people succeed? | Training, manager toolkits, coaching, and SME support. | Proficiency checks |
| Control | Reinforcement | How do we make it stick? | Adoption dashboards, reinforcement plans, and handoff to process owners. | Adoption at 90 days with speed, utilization, and proficiency each at 80% or higher; monitored up to one year |
Results
Adoption averages three measures: speed (the share of readiness deadlines met, such as training and sign-off by the target date), utilization (the share of affected people who have left the old process and tools behind, tracked on a rolling basis), and proficiency (the share of possible errors avoided across the population). Each measure had to reach 80% on its own; any shortfall triggered course correction until it did.
- From push to pull: demand shifted from Ken offering support to leaders asking for it early, along with invitations to speak about the approach.
Selected initiatives
Business-side project management and change, with all training built in-house.
Led process redesign and change for a roughly 300-person customer experience and scheduling operation.
Enterprise transition of employee benefits administration.
The first enterprise engagement survey, and the external client survey platform.
Improvements to regulated training for clients and employees.
A dedicated retention program, with onboarding and early-tenure redesign, behind a significant, sustained reduction in frontline attrition over about two years.
Yellow Belt cohorts that built improvement capability into the workforce.
What Ken would do differently
The function was built while it was already delivering, so templates, toolkits, and intake tools were created along the way. With the chance to do it again, Ken would set up that foundation before the first engagement, so stakeholders get a smooth experience from day one.
Introduce the function to leaders across the enterprise before the first project, so demand builds sooner and the first engagements start with trust already in place.
Give subject-matter experts a structured workbook at the start, so their knowledge feeds the plan from day one instead of being gathered along the way.
Building something similar?
Ken is glad to talk through how this approach could fit your organization.