Prosci’s New Approach to Research

Prosci is changing the way they conduct their change management research. This will mean more opportunities for you to participate and benefit from this research. You will also have more timely access to the research results, which in turn will support more effective decision making when implementing change.

One of the reasons that Navigo became an authorized training provider of Prosci’s change management programs was because the program content is based on best practices research. Prosci continually conducts research to understand trends and leading indicators in the change management discipline. They use the data and analytical results to regularly update their change management methodology and toolset. The research based approach is one of the key reasons organizations around the world choose the Prosci methodology for managing change.

The output of Prosci’s research that most people are familiar with is the Best Practices in Change Management Report. If you’ve attended Prosci’s Sponsor, Manager or Certification Program, you will have received a copy of the Best Practices Report. Historically, Prosci’s approach has been to conduct a research study and publish the Best Practices Report every two years. Prosci has conducted nine of these studies over the last 18 years. The 2016 Best Practices Report represents the largest body of knowledge related to managing the people side of change and is based on the combined insights and experiences from more than 4500 participants from around the world.

Prosci recently announced a new approach to how they conduct research. To support their goals of being an industry thought leader and producing timely research, Prosci will now conduct smaller, focused studies and produce reports at shorter time intervals and potentially make available in a variety of mediums and formats. They still intend to publish a comprehensive, core Best Practices edition of their research every two years. However, they won’t conduct research on each and every topic every two years as some of the information is quite stable.

The first of these small studies is the Application of ADKAR, an examination of how Prosci’s individual change model is being used in organizations. Prosci received over 400 responses to this study and are now analyzing the data that was submitted. A summary of the results will be shared in a future post. The next two studies are:

• Change Management and Agile – in simple terms, agile development is a different way of managing IT projects and development teams. This study will focus on two aspects of Agile: How to manage the change of moving to an Agile development approach and how to manage the people side of change in an Agile setting.
• Change Management and Generations – this study will examine how generational differences impact change management approaches and results

The Change Management and Agile study has just commenced. For more information on how to participate, please see my post 'Change Management and Agile'. The third study will be conducted in 2017.