Business Change Roundtable: Building an Effective Business Change Function
Charlotte Whitehouse
We recently brought together transformation, PMO and change leaders from across policing, higher education, life sciences, local government, further education and IT for a candid conversation about what it really takes to stand up an effective business change function.
Nobody was reading from a script. The conversation ranged freely, and it quickly became clear that while “business change” looks different in every organisation around the table, the obstacles to getting it right are strikingly familiar.
Here’s what stood out:
1. Business Change and IT Are Converging, and AI Is Accelerating It
The conversation opened with a view from the technology side of the fence: the traditional line between IT delivery and business change is blurring fast.
One participant argued that AI is shifting power toward the business itself, to the point where business teams may increasingly build their own tools and simply come to IT for support, rather than the other way around. The consequence could be a genuine recalibration of roles on both sides.
What stayed constant, though, was the underlying lesson: technology only gets adopted when the people building it genuinely understand the people using it, not just the requirements document.
2. Partner Early, not “Over the Fence”
Several participants agreed that the biggest shift in successful change delivery has been abandoning the old model, requirements thrown over the fence to IT, followed by a product nobody wants two years later.
The alternative: embedding business change from day one, with daily involvement, regular testing and continuous input, not just on functionality but on adoption. This, the group agreed, is only going to matter more as AI shortens development cycles, making early, continuous partnership even more critical rather than less.
3. Mature Change Capability Often Comes from Crisis, But It Doesn’t Have to Stay That Way
One of the more striking reflections was how often a well-functioning change capability traces back to a moment of crisis. When an organisation is forced to improve at speed, its ability to manage change matures quickly, almost out of necessity.
The challenge raised by the group: how do you build and sustain that same level of maturity and urgency without waiting for a crisis to force your hand?
4. Building Change Capacity Without a Big Specialist Team
For organisations without a dedicated business change function, this was the sharpest pain point of the session. How do you build enough change capacity to support multiple competing initiatives when you don’t have the headroom for a large specialist team, and when influence, not authority, is often your only real lever?
One answer that resonated with the group: hire and develop people who can stretch across different types of work.
Building a flexible talent base such as project managers and business analysts capable of turning their hand to broader change activity, not just technical delivery, is what creates capacity headroom, more than headcount alone.
5. To Get Adoption, Connect Change to Real Pain Points, Not Frameworks
A recurring theme: change management only gets traction when people can see it solving a problem they already recognise, not when it’s introduced as a methodology or a set of models.
One participant described the breakthrough moment as coming when a senior leader asked how frontline teams would realistically use a change framework in practice, exposing the gap between theoretical training and day-to-day relevance.
The fix was finding specific, function-by-function examples of where change capability directly improved outcomes people already cared about, then reinforcing that message repeatedly through newsletters, drop-in clinics and testimonials.
“Sometimes it’s quite hard to get numbers,” one participant reflected, “but even qualitative feedback actually provided a lot of value whenever we were engaging on this topic with other teams.”
6. Structure Alone Isn’t Enough: You Need a Clear, Communicated Service Offer
Several participants who had recently built or rebuilt a business change function from scratch shared the same lesson: getting the org chart right is the easy part. The harder part is clearly articulating what the function actually does, and getting the rest of the organisation to come looking for that support proactively, rather than the team having to go out and sell itself internally.
This extended to embedding change properly, not just delivering the technology.
One example shared: a new system had recently gone live and was being celebrated as a success internally, while the training and process work needed to embed it with users hadn’t been done yet. Delivery and adoption, the group agreed, are not the same milestone.
7. Funding Business Change Remains Unresolved
Almost every participant raised funding as an ongoing challenge. Business change is frequently treated as a cost centre rather than something centrally funded, which makes sustaining it difficult, particularly in organisations under budget pressure.
Approaches varied, from funding change capability through an adjacent budget, to building a flexible internal “menu” of change services that smaller projects could draw on (impact assessments, audits, lighter-touch support) without needing a full-time change manager. One participant is now exploring a recharge or tariff-style model to formalise exactly this.
8. AI Will Reshape Roles, but the Human Side of Change Becomes More Important, Not Less
AI came up throughout the session, but the group’s view was consistent: it’s a capability shift, not a replacement for the human work of change.
Several participants noted that skill requirements are already visibly shifting, from data and reporting expectations in PMO roles through to broader anxiety and scepticism among staff who feel change is being imposed rather than developed with them.
As one participant closed the session: however good the tool, adoption still comes down to addressing people’s fears and building their confidence and capability, and that human element of change becomes even more important, not less, as AI adoption accelerates.
Our thanks to everyone who gave up their time and spoke so candidly, it’s exactly that honesty that makes these sessions worth attending.
We’re planning further sessions on related topics in the coming months. If any of this reflects challenges you’re wrestling with in your own organisation, we’d genuinely like to hear how you’re approaching them.
Interested in joining a future roundtable, or want to find out more about the series? Get in touch below.
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