Change management
Brussels
I am hired to make the months after go-live hold: the months when the steering committee has moved on, hypercare has closed, and the people who have to work differently are on their own. That is where a business case is won, which is exactly why the work has to start long before it. Getting there takes two things at once, a programme run with discipline and adoption built on purpose. I do both, from the first workshop to the handover.
Written by
David Hachez. Prosci® certified change practitioner and programme manager. Twenty-five years across enterprise transformation programmes, IT and PMO portfolios, and three companies of my own, two of them sold. I work on my own feet: the person you interview is the person on the ground for the whole programme.
The argument
The business case is approved. The plan is clean, the vendor demo went well, the integration architecture has been reviewed twice. The risk register names data migration, interface stability, budget, resourcing.
It rarely names the risk that reliably materialises: that the organisation will carry on working exactly as it did, using the new system as a more expensive version of the old one.
Workshops, sprints, war rooms, a steering committee every three weeks, a newsletter nobody opens. Attention is abundant, and for a few months the programme is the most important thing in the building.
This is when change management usually gets bought, and where it usually gets reduced to communication and training. Those are two levers. They are not the mechanism.
The consultants have gone. Hypercare has closed. A depot supervisor with a shift to fill, or a controller closing a month, decides whether the new process is worth the extra clicks, or whether the spreadsheet that always worked is still on the shared drive.
Nothing about that decision appears on a milestone chart. It is the only thing that determines whether any of it was worth doing.
That moment is what my company is named after, and it is the part of a programme I design backwards from. Everything that comes before it, from the plan and the governance through to sponsor work, manager enablement and training, exists to change what happens then. Programmes that are built this way hold.
The work
Rarely the first one, which is a shame, because it is the moment where the same money buys the most. Here is what each call costs you, said plainly, because you will work it out for yourself anyway. Whichever one you recognise, the calendar is beside it.
01
Impact and readiness assessment, the sponsor coalition, and a change strategy that names who has to do what differently and what will stop them. Scoped against the business case, not against a communication calendar. I stay through delivery and hand over at the end, so nothing designed here is quietly dropped later. Everything downstream gets cheaper.
02
Training attendance is fine and nothing is landing. Middle managers are relaying dates instead of meaning. I find where the ADKAR chain is actually broken (awareness, desire, knowledge, ability, reinforcement), and then work the one link that is failing rather than all five at once.
03
The system is live, the programme is closed, and the benefits are not appearing. This is archaeology as much as change management: finding which workarounds became permanent, which of them are entirely rational, and what it would now take to move them.
Delivery
Adoption cannot rescue a programme that is badly run, and a well-run programme does not produce adoption on its own. I take on both, which means one person holding the plan and the people instead of two consultants pointing at each other across a steering committee.
Programme
management
Scope, plan, critical path, dependencies, RAID discipline, budget tracking, and a steering committee pack that says what is actually true rather than what is comfortable. Agile, stage-gated, or the hybrid that large organisations really run.
PMO
governance
Portfolio visibility, stage gates, decision logs, and the unglamorous work of ensuring that a decision taken in March is still being applied in September. Where governance has drifted, I reset it; where it never existed, I build the lightest version that holds.
Scope and
vendors
Holding integrators and software vendors to what was signed, arbitrating change requests on their merits, and defending the benefits from the thousand small concessions that quietly consume them. Twenty-five years of buying and selling technology helps here.
Upstream
work
Business model validation, value proposition mapping, trendwatching and concept design. Process and workflow automation where the win is operational. Microsoft Catalyst for framing the business case, and Service Adoption for the Microsoft 365 side of a rollout.
Method
Deliberately simple. The difficulty in transformation is never the diagram. It is holding the line between what was decided and what people do on Monday morning.
Exploration
I map the terrain before proposing anything: impact assessment, stakeholder analysis, desk research, whatever data exists. I challenge the brief itself, so that what we commit to is the real problem rather than the presenting one.
Alignment
Sponsors who speak with one voice. Managers who can say what changes for their own team without reading from a slide. A plan built on the ADKAR® model rather than on a publication schedule.
Execution
Adoption measured, not assumed. Resistance surfaced early, while it is still cheap to address. Reinforcement designed to outlive my invoice, which is, after all, the whole point.
Track record
Enterprise transformations, complex IT and PMO portfolios, and technology companies built from nothing, across the public and private sectors in Europe.
Public &
enterprise
Change management for major public transport operators and international bodies on high-stakes SAP S/4HANA migrations, fleet management systems and digital workplace rollouts. These are the programmes where a failed adoption is measured in years rather than quarters, and where the delivery discipline has to be as good as the change work.
Global
brands
Cross-functional rollouts, e-commerce launches in markets as unforgiving as China, and connection strategy for internationally recognised names.
Founded
and sold
Co-founded and led three technology companies, two of them through to acquisition. Among them Emolytics, a UCLouvain spin-off that captured millions of customer-experience datapoints for large organisations. I have carried a P&L and signed the invoices, which changes how you read a business case.
Engagements
Three ways in. Every assignment opens with a first block of work scoped against an explicit objective, so you can judge the value before committing to the rest.
Embedded
Impact assessment, change strategy, sponsor and manager enablement, communication, training coordination and adoption measurement, through hypercare and handover to whoever keeps it alive after me.
Interim
Interim project or programme manager on a critical initiative, or a PMO reset when governance has drifted: scope, plan, dependencies, risk, reporting, and the decisions that have been quietly avoided.
Focused
A strategy offsite, an ADKAR® primer for your management line, a team-dynamics session built on MBTI® or the Enneagram, or a lecture series. Designed for your context, never delivered off the shelf.
Credentials
Sustainable transformation needs structural governance and human adoption in the same pair of hands. Mine are anchored in internationally recognised standards on one side, and in the study of personality and team dynamics on the other, with the platform certifications that keep the technology conversation honest.
Certification
Certified in applying the ADKAR® model to lead the human side of organisational change through complex migrations.
Certification
Behavioural work applied to team dynamics, leadership alignment and interpersonal agility. Individual results stay with the individual.
Degree
Louvain School of Management, UCLouvain.
Teaching
IHECS, ICHEC Entreprises, Solvay Brussels School, EFP and CREA Genève. Teaching is a discipline of its own, and it remains the fastest way I know to find out whether an idea actually holds.
Certification
Microsoft Certified MB-901 (Dynamics 365 Fundamentals) and MB-200 (Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Core). Microsoft Catalyst practitioner for business-case framing, and Microsoft Service Adoption Specialist for the adoption side of Microsoft 365 rollouts.
Contact
I will tell you honestly whether I am the right person for it. If I am not, I usually know someone who is.
The After SRL
Avenue JF Debecker 111, B-1200 Brussels, Belgium
Enterprise and VAT: BE 0892.297.654