The city had state approval to modernize its core systems for seven years, but progress kept restarting every time a key employee resigned. The effort was being driven entirely out of the IT department, with no visible sponsorship from the city manager or HR, which meant the same exhaustion and low appetite for change kept resurfacing with every new portal release. A better project plan wouldn't fix that. Only ownership that reached beyond IT would.
Case Study
The rollout wasn’t stalling on software, it was stalling on ownership outside IT.
A small city government had state approval to modernize its systems for seven years, watching the effort restart every time a key employee left. We built the change management playbook, communication plan, and cross-departmental accountability the rollout had never had.
Engagement at-a-glance
Industry:
Government
Organization size:
~ 300+ employees serving a population of 55,000
Services:
Initiative Recovery & Stabilization
Change Management
Enterprise System Implementation
Change Management
Enterprise System Implementation
The Challenge
The rollout looked like an IT project. The real gap was leadership standing behind it.
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Years of turnover kept resetting progress
The city had been approved to modernize its core systems for roughly seven years, but repeated resignations among key staff meant the effort restarted more than once, on top of pandemic-related delays.
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Change was being driven from IT alone
The modernization effort was being pushed entirely out of the IT department, without visible sponsorship from the city manager or HR, the functions that would typically carry a change effort of this scale. That left the work with a misplaced center of gravity and no cross-departmental backing.
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Low appetite for change after a messy history
Years of stalled, disorganized attempts had left city staff exhausted by the idea of another rollout, with one to two more years of portal releases still ahead.
Our Approach
We wrote the playbook from what was already in flight, not from a blank page.
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1
Observed an in-flight portal release before writing anything
We joined about a month before the city's first external-facing utility billing portal went live and sat in on the preparation meetings, using that release to see firsthand what was working and what wasn't.
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2
Built a change management playbook from proven templates
We adapted The Gunter Group's change management playbook templates, covering current-state assessment, communication plans, and editorial calendars, into a playbook built specifically around the city's portal-by-portal rollout.
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3
Presented the playbook directly to the city manager and city leads
We delivered the playbook through a final presentation to the city manager and city leadership, translating how the information was gathered and what it meant into a resource the city's own teams could act on.
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4
Applied the playbook to the next portal release in flight
We built a communication plan and stakeholder map for the next portal release, working directly with the permitting and licensing teams to put the playbook's recommendations into practice immediately.
Value Delivered
The next time change stalls, the city finally has somewhere to turn.
Delivered a change management playbook IT could point to
A printed, ready-to-use playbook gives the city a resource it didn't have before, covering current state, communication planning, and editorial calendars for every future portal release.
Gave departments a shared resource to hold each other accountable
IT staff can now point other departments, like finance, to a defined set of approvals, design, and discovery steps before a new project gets scheduled, rather than absorbing every request on demand.
Instituted a metrics-based review culture the city never had
The city began tracking adoption indicators such as call volume and community satisfaction, building a metrics-based review habit where none had existed before.
Surfaced an organizational design gap beyond the ERP itself
The engagement gave the city manager a narrative showing that not all change should originate from IT, opening the door to broader organizational design conversations informed by how other cities operate.
Results that reflect the work behind them.
7 years
Time the ERP modernization had been approved but repeatedly stalled before this engagement began
6 months
Length of the engagement that produced the city's first change management playbook
1st
Ever baseline metrics framework implemented for city-wide ERP releases
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