IRCC Enterprise Change Management: Diagnosing a service delivery gap

Overview

The Enterprise Change Management team at Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada was established in 2020 to guide the department through a period of major transformation: a Strategic Immigration Review, an Organizational Review, and a Digital Platform Modernization initiative. Three years in, ECM had trained over 500 change management practitioners, coached 64 leaders, and advised more than 20 programmes and projects. Yet internal clients were not consistently engaging with ECM as a strategic partner, and many did not feel supported after engagements ended.

A research team was engaged to examine why and to help ECM define a clearer value proposition and service delivery model.

ECM at a glance: three active functions, three under development, and a Change Coalition of practitioners distributed across IRCC departments.

The problem

I contributed to framing both the original and reframed challenge statements. The reframe emerged directly from the case study analysis I led, identifying a positioning gap rather than a delivery gap before it was validated through the survey.

The challenge ECM brought to the project was framed around delivery: how might ECM best support internal client needs across all phases of change initiatives? The research revealed a different kind of problem.

ECM aimed to operate as a strategic planning partner but was largely embedded at an optimization and control level. Clients either did not understand what ECM could offer, did not see the need for strategic change management support, or preferred to have ECM execute rather than advise. The result was a function with real capability that was not being used at the level it was designed for.

The original challenge: how might ECM best support internal client needs across all phases of change initiatives?

Case study analysis

I led the case study analysis across the team. Applying the Viable Systems Model and service blueprinting were my primary contributions. The three-lens synthesis framework was developed by me and refined collaboratively.

ECM provided seven case studies of past advisory projects. Each was analyzed through three lenses: the Viable Systems Model to map which organizational functions ECM was fulfilling across projects, the cone model to assess how its involvement varied across organizational levels, and service blueprinting to identify patterns in how client engagements began, progressed, and ended.

The VSM analysis showed ECM mostly operating at an optimization and control level, occasionally reaching strategic planning functions. Across the cone, ECM was present at every level but without a consistent approach to communicating its value at each one. The service delivery patterns were the most telling: when clients had actively sought out ECM, engagements succeeded. When ECM was embedded without client initiation, projects more frequently resulted in abandoned change efforts. The precondition for success was client buy-in before the engagement started, not the quality of service during it.

Sample three-lens analysis: ECM aimed for strategic involvement but clients sought operational support, creating a gap that shaped the entire service delivery model.

Survey research

I co-designed the survey questionnaire with the team. ECM managed distribution and collected responses. I led both the quantitative and qualitative analysis, including open coding and thematic synthesis of the open-ended responses.

A client survey was developed to validate and extend the case study findings. Evaluative questions assessed ECM service delivery on a seven-point Likert scale; exploratory open-ended questions surfaced client needs. ECM scored highest on responsiveness to inquiries but significantly lower on understanding client needs, guiding clients through the change process, and leaving them equipped to continue independently. The post-engagement capability gap was the starkest finding.

The exploratory analysis surfaced four priority areas: training and learning pathways, a dedicated change manager on project teams, early-stage planning support, and progress tracking.

Sample survey finding: four out of five clients need early CM preparation and stakeholder involvement, validating ECM priorities but exposing gaps in current outreach timing.

Sample survey finding: four out of five clients want a dedicated CM resource on their team, and three out of five report HR constraints have hindered their CM success.

Co-creation workshop

The workshop was a collective effort across the team. I participated in facilitation, note-taking, and synthesis, contributing to all three roles throughout the session.

A co-creation workshop was held with the ECM team via Miro and Zoom. Rather than presenting findings for reaction, the session asked ECM members to draw on their own experience as government employees: what change had meant to them personally, where they had seen resistance and openness, and where stakeholder buy-in typically broke down. The goal was to ground the research in ECM perspective before moving to recommendations.

One of the session outputs was a structured map of change triggers within IRCC, organized across four categories: changes internal to IRCC, changes driven by government-wide directives, external events the department had no choice but to respond to, and external conditions where a response was optional. This taxonomy gave the research team a concrete view of the range and origin of change that ECM was expected to support, and surfaced how much of that change originated outside any individual department control.

Workshop output: change triggers mapped across four categories, from internal IRCC reorganizations through government-wide directives to external events outside departmental control.

From findings to opportunities

Synthesizing research into the six opportunity areas was collaborative. I led the case study thread and contributed substantially to the challenge reframe. The STEEPV and SWOT analyses were team efforts.

Across the case study analysis, survey, STEEPV scan, and SWOT, six challenge areas emerged consistently. Each represented a gap between what ECM was currently doing and what the function needed to operate at the level it was designed for.

Six opportunity areas: the research pointed to consistent gaps in proactive capacity, value proposition, measurement, service delivery model, stakeholder understanding, and communication strategy.

These six areas produced a reframed challenge. Rather than asking how ECM could better deliver its existing services, the question became: how might ECM co-define with clients a unique value proposition and service delivery model to ensure IRCC is change-ready? The shift moves the problem from execution to positioning, and from ECM doing more to clients understanding more.

Reframed challenge: from how ECM supports clients operationally to how ECM co-defines its value proposition and service model with them.

Recommendations and toolkit

The Phase 1 recommendations and the Change Management 101 toolkit were primarily my work, including content development and visual design. Phases 2 and 3 were led by other team members.

Recommendations were structured across three phases. Phase 1 covered immediate actions, each supported by a specific toolkit output. Phase 2 addressed structural changes to the service delivery model. Phase 3 outlined the longer-horizon desired state requiring cultural and structural shifts in parallel with the earlier phases.

The first recommendation was to continue exploring client needs. The toolkit adapted the Change Triangle framework to give ECM a structured way to map where a stakeholder sits emotionally in response to a change trigger, and what kind of support would move them toward an open-minded state for change management or change leadership. Rather than assuming resistance was a barrier, the framework treated it as a diagnostic starting point.

Recommendation 1: the Change Triangle adapted for ECM, mapping stakeholder responses from defense and inhibitory states toward an open-minded state of change leadership.

The second recommendation was to standardize data collection and analysis. The toolkit proposed embedding intake and progress forms throughout the ECM service journey, from onboarding and alignment through touchpoints and revisions to off-boarding and retrospective lessons learned. The forms were adapted from the workshop prompts, designed so clients could self-diagnose their change readiness and ECM could track patterns across engagements over time.

Recommendation 2: the intake and progress forms mapped to the ECM service journey, from initial onboarding through touchpoints, living progress, and retrospective lessons learned.

The third recommendation was to further customize ECM communication across departments. The toolkit used workshop data to map the gap between clients who felt they had no choice in change and those who saw options in how to respond. The ECM opportunity space sits in the overlap: clients who want support but have not yet internalized that change management is the mechanism for getting it. The toolkit gave ECM concrete language for entering that space.

Recommendation 3: client responses when change allows no choice versus when it offers options, with the ECM opportunity space in the overlap.

The matrix of recommendations closes the research arc: ten recommendations across three phases, each mapped to the six opportunity areas the research identified. Pink rows are Phase 1, yellow Phase 2, blue Phase 3.

Matrix of recommendations: ten recommendations across three phases, mapped to the six opportunity areas identified through research.

Reflection

The clearest finding from this engagement was about preconditions. ECM was a capable function operating in contexts where the conditions for its success had not been established. Clients who sought ECM out proactively had better outcomes than those assigned support. That gap is not a delivery problem. It is a positioning and communication problem, and it requires a different kind of investment than improving service quality.

Working inside a large federal department also made visible something about how organizational change functions operate at scale. The formal mandate and the day-to-day reality diverge. ECM aspired to strategic influence but spent much of its time on operational tasks because that was where clients could see immediate value. Closing that gap requires changing what clients understand about change management before they ever engage with ECM.

The problem was not how ECM delivered its services. It was whether clients understood what to ask for in the first place.