How Change Management Changed Me: A Change Management Success Story

By Victoria Farberov, Process Improvement & Change Management Intern

June 24, 2021

Victoria’s journey with change management has been slightly different than many of the other people here at the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT). The reason is  she started as an intern in the Office of Process Improvement (OPI), which manages CDOT’s Change Management Program. Only two weeks into her internship Victoria was assigned to act as a co-producer for a half day managers and supervisors change management course taught at CDOT. It wouldn’t be until months later that Victoria would be enrolled in a course as a participant. 

Victoria Farberov

Photo of Victoria Farberov

This made for a unique experience, because not only did she learn change management from behind the scenes, she gained first hand experience and knowledge from working on different projects and working with a changement management professional.  Working in OPI is always a  fast-paced journey where the learning never stops. From her first day as an intern Victoria was thrown into multiple different projects and many of these projects included an aspect of change management, the people side of change.

Now fast forward to month 6 of Victoria’s internship and the biggest effort that OPI has been working on is a new program, Concept to Project (C2P). C2P aims to provide a one-stop shop for business improvement projects with a robust list of services including tools, resources, training, consultation services, and a support network. At this stage in developing the C2P program, the team has started to build some of those different tools, as well as many different communication efforts in order to create awareness and desire about the benefits of the program. 

There are 5 different sub teams that are involved in designing the C2P Program:  

Victoria has been involved with each of the sub teams and helping to organize, provide support services and doing the work that needs to be done to ensure that these efforts come to fruition. 

The focus of the C2P Change Management Team is to prepare people for the changes that are coming as a result of the new program being created. The C2P team wants to support CDOT employees through these changes, build excitement about the program and work to alleviate any possible resistance that CDOT’ers may have about the coming changes. The change management team is also creating a change management plan that emphasizes the roles in the organization because everyone plays a part in times of change. By focusing on what Executive Sponsors need to do and what CDOT Supervisors need to do, the team is ensuring that all CDOT employees are supported as they adjust to and adopt any changes that may impact them.  

C2P is working to position the program as one that will support others and add value to all CDOT employees. To share this message, the team has had to come up with multiple ways to share ‘the why’, ‘the benefits’ and ‘C2P’s purpose’. Victoria worked to produce robust fact sheets, articles, and even a video series. One of the takeaways from the 3 day change management course is that it is important to give key information ‘5-7 times’ for people to really internalize the messages, which is what the team and Victoria is aiming to do with these different communication methods. 

After completing the change management course for practitioners, Victoria has increased the number of tools in her toolbox and this has helped her to approach projects that she works on more holistically. She now considers different tools and lessons that were taught in the course, such as the ADKAR framework. When working on a project Victoria now thinks about where the different groups of impacted people are in the ADKAR model. This helps her to think through what needs to be done to help them move through the process of change. 

An example of how Victoria employed the use of the ADKAR tool was during a recent coordinated project between CDOT and The Denver Department of Transportation and Infrastructure (DOTI). Before the start of Victoria’s internship, there had been a few conversations about the IGA process between CDOT and DOTI, but it had come to a standstill as both sides did not understand the steps that the other was doing within the process. In order to combat this Victoria needed to understand where the change had stalled.  By participating in an introductory meeting she figured out that while all participants seem to have awareness and desire to improve, there was a lack of knowledge about the IGA process as a whole. After discovering this, the next step was to find out what knowledge was known already and what needed to be learned.  

Victoria participated in the next few sessions helping both groups to gather information from different sources and provide OPI with the steps of the process that each group did, respectively. After this was done Victoria took the job of creating a process map to lay out the process they were describing. This is where everyone became ‘unstuck’ in the process of change. Both teams realized some mistakes in the process where the steps were different than what they had said. They started to see where steps were not documented and where steps took too long. By doing this their knowledge increased and the group could move on to the next part of the ADKAR model; ability. This team is currently working to gain the ability to perform the new process in concert as designed.  Without using change management, CDOT and DOTI would have remained stuck in a process that didn’t provide them the best value.  

Change management should be an integral part of every project in which you participate. By communicating effectively and understanding the people you work with, you can make all your projects a success. The goal is always to help both our internal and external customers and the way this can be done is by being good change leaders.