Change Management in Practice

Abstract

This thesis examines how change management is implemented across organizational levels in a large-scale digital transformation program. As organizations increasingly rely on enterprise-wide systems such as SAP to drive transformation, the gap between strategic intentions and operational practice has become a central challenge. The study explores how change is translated, adapted, and sometimes weakened as it moves from strategic actors to those who carry it out in everyday work. Based on a qualitative single case study of a global manufacturing organization, the research draws on semi-structured interviews with respondents at the strategic, local, and operational levels involved in the change management process, including the global change manager, local change managers, project managers, and process and solution key users (PSKUs). The interview data was complemented by document analysis of internal project and change management materials. The findings show that change management in this digital transformation program is not carried out as a sequential or centrally controlled process, but as a distributed, multi-level, and continuous activity. The change management function operates through a hybrid model that combines a strategic layer responsible for shared frameworks and materials with a local layer responsible for execution, communication, training, and follow-up at each site. Project managers and PSKUs are not formally part of the change management structure, but they play important roles in how the change reaches end users in practice. The process is shaped by several interrelated challenges, including strategic ambiguity around ownership and direction, gaps between formal training and applied practice, limited managerial engagement, technical dependencies that disrupt the planning of people-side activities, and resource and time constraints. These challenges interact and reinforce one another, which contributes to the variation in how change is enacted across sites. The thesis contributes to the literature by conceptualizing change management in digital transformation as a distributed, socio-technical, and continuous process rather than a structured sequence of activities. Formal frameworks such as ADKAR remain useful, but their effectiveness depends on how they are embedded in organizational routines, supported by managers, and aligned with technical delivery. The study also offers practical insights for organizations undergoing similar transformations, including earlier integration of change management into project planning, more standardized processes across sites, stronger targeted communication, closer alignment between people-side activities and technical releases, and broader distribution of change management capability beyond formally designated roles.