Study guide

15.1 Measurement Types and the Change Delivery Scorecard

APMG Change Management Foundation Exam

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1 Chapter 1: The v3 Foundation Exam and the Organisational Context

1.1 Exam Structure, the Five Syllabus Areas and the Certification Path 1.2 Scene Setting: External and Internal Factors Shaping Change 1.3 Change Management, Benefits and Dis-benefits

2 Chapter 2: Understanding the Change Context

2.1 Kelman's Three Levels of Adoption 2.2 VUCA and the Cynefin Framework 2.3 Planned Change versus Emergent Change 2.4 Systems Thinking in Change 2.5 Organisational Culture and Its Three Levels

3 Chapter 3: Diagnosing and Structuring the Change Approach

3.1 Lewin's Force Field Analysis 3.2 Co-Design 3.3 The ADKAR Model 3.4 Evolving the n-Step Process and Kotter's Eight Accelerators

4 Chapter 4: Delivery Strategy, Agile Practices and the Change Strategy

4.1 Delivery Strategy: Big Bang, Phased, Voluntary and Iterative 4.2 Agile Practices and Agile Change Practices 4.3 The Continuous Change Management Cycle 4.4 The Change Strategy

5 Chapter 5: People and Change — Individual Difference and Response

5.1 Differences in People and Personality Preferences 5.2 Neuroscience and Change: SCARF, Mindset and Insight 5.3 The Change Curve 5.4 Bridges' Transition Model

6 Chapter 6: Motivation, Resilience and Learning

6.1 Rewards, Punishment and Pink's Three Motivators 6.2 Positive Psychology, Resilience and Appreciative Inquiry 6.3 The Beckhard-Harris Change Formula and Schein's Two Anxieties 6.4 Competence, Learning and the Learning Dip 6.5 Learning Preferences: Kolb, Honey and Mumford

7 Chapter 7: Key Roles in Change Leadership

7.1 Key Roles in the Change Process 7.2 The Role of the Change Sponsor 7.3 The Change Agent's Role and Personal Influence 7.4 The Role of Local Leadership in Change

8 Chapter 8: Psychological Safety, Leadership and Culture

8.1 Psychological Climate and Psychological Safety 8.2 Carolyn Taylor: How Leadership Shapes Culture 8.3 Leadership Styles and Organisational Climate

9 Chapter 9: Teams and Change

9.1 Team Structures and Change Agent Networks 9.2 Tuckman's Stages of Team Development 9.3 Lencioni: Assessing and Growing Team Effectiveness 9.4 Harvesting the Value of Team Diversity

10 Chapter 10: Stakeholder Identification, Analysis and Engagement

10.1 Stakeholder Definition and Identification 10.2 Stakeholder Analysis, Segmentation and Empathy Mapping 10.3 Stakeholder Mapping and Sources of Power 10.4 Barriers to Engagement 10.5 Planning Stakeholder Engagement

11 Chapter 11: Communication Theory, Messaging and Emotional Connection

11.1 Communication Theory and the Communication Process 11.2 Barriers to Communication and Cognitive Biases 11.3 Messaging: Setting Context and the Tell, Sell, Include Approach 11.4 Appealing to Hearts and Minds

12 Chapter 12: Communication Channels and Planning

12.1 Ways of Communicating and VARK Language Style Preferences 12.2 Communication Channels: One-Way, Two-Way, Lean and Rich 12.3 Communications Planning

13 Chapter 13: Assessing Change Impact and Severity

13.1 Change Management as Risk Management and the Two-Step Assessment 13.2 Step 1: Categorising Impacts and Identifying Impact Areas 13.3 Step 1 Continued: Gap Analysis, Impact Profiles and Monitoring 13.4 Step 2: Change Impact Severity

14 Chapter 14: Resistance to Change

14.1 Causes of Resistance and Oreg's Four Neural Factors 14.2 Common Reasons for Resistance and How to Deal With Them 14.3 Building a Strategy to Manage Resistance

15 Chapter 15: Change Analytics and Exam Readiness

15.1 Measurement Types and the Change Delivery Scorecard 15.2 Building a Change Analytics Strategy 15.3 Exam Technique and Final Revision

15.1 Measurement Types and the Change Delivery Scorecard

Key Takeaways Explain This Topic AI

Change managers must define and agree measures and indicators reflective of the desired outcomes, known as key performance indicators

The three factors to consider when defining measures are cadence, actionable and need

Cadence is when and how often data is collected, and actionable asks what will happen as a result and who is accountable

Kaplan and Norton offer four metric types for a scorecard: financial, customer, internal, and learning and growth

  • Learning and growth covers human capital, information capital and organisational capital
  • Last updated: September 2026

To show the change is on track, change managers must define and agree a set of measures and indicators reflective of the desired outcomes — key performance indicators (KPIs). CM3 adds an important qualifier: the selection of metrics should have input from users and needs strong buy-in from stakeholders.

That qualifier matters. Metrics imposed on people are gamed; metrics people helped choose are used. It is co-design applied to measurement, and it also protects fairness in SCARF terms, since being measured against criteria you had no say in is a classic fairness threat.

Three factors to consider

  • Factor The question it answers
  • Cadence (rhythm) When and how often data is collected

Actionable What will happen as a result? Who is accountable for this?

Need Co-design and align expectations around why measures are in place and how they indicate progress

Actionable is the factor that kills most change measurement. A metric collected with no defined response and no accountable owner produces a chart nobody acts on and, in time, a chart nobody reads. Before adopting any change measure, the two questions to answer are: what will we do differently at each plausible value, and who owns that decision? If neither has an answer, the measure should not be collected.

Cadence is a real design choice rather than an afterthought. Measure too frequently and you see noise and impose survey fatigue; too infrequently and you learn about a problem after the window to fix it has closed. Cadence should match how fast the thing being measured can actually move.

The change delivery scorecard

Kaplan and Norton (2004) offer four types of metric and corresponding questions that are useful when building a scorecard covering different views on value:

Category The question Example metrics

Financial If we succeed, how will we look to our stakeholders (or taxpayers or donors)? Cost reductions, revenue increase, resource use

Customer To achieve our vision, how must we look to our customer (internal or external)? Quality, customer service, partnership behaviours

Internal To satisfy our customers, which process must we excel at? Operational, customer management, innovation or regulatory process metrics — time to market, reductions in risk profiles, number of information data breaches

Learning & growth To achieve our vision, how must our organisation learn and improve? Human capital (employee knowledge, skills and ability profiles); information capital (knowledge management and sharing systems); organisational capital (culture aspects such as teamwork, alignment and leadership styles)

Note that customer explicitly includes internal customers. A change to an internal shared service has customers, and measuring how it looks to them is a legitimate scorecard category.

Learning and growth is the change-relevant category

The three capitals under learning and growth are the ones most directly connected to change management:

Human capital — employee knowledge, skills and ability profiles. This is where the learning dip, competence development and ADKAR's knowledge and ability steps become measurable

Information capital — knowledge management and sharing systems

Organisational capital — culture aspects such as teamwork, alignment and leadership styles. This is where change maturity, psychological safety and Taylor's culture mechanisms show up in numbers

A scorecard that reports only financial and customer metrics will show a change succeeding right up to the point where the depleted human and organisational capital produces a failure nobody predicted.

Building a usable scorecard

A change delivery scorecard sets, for each category, an indicator with a current value and a target value — for example reducing operating costs from a current overspend to a target saving, cutting billing time from seven days to three, reducing monthly complaints from 125 to 20, raising a right-first-time rate from 40% to 85%, moving a centralisation measure from 15% to 100%, or lifting training uptake from 0% to 85%.

Three design points make such a scorecard work in practice:

Balance across the four categories. The point of a scorecard is that no single view of value dominates. Change programmes gravitate to internal process metrics because they are easiest to collect.

A current value as well as a target. Without a baseline, a target is an aspiration and progress cannot be shown.

Few enough measures to act on. A scorecard with forty indicators fails the actionable test by construction, because no one can respond to forty signals.

Connecting measurement back to the change

Measurement is not a reporting obligation bolted onto the end. It is the discovery input to the continuous change management cycle, it is what makes ADKAR's reinforcement step answerable — is it working, and how is that demonstrated? — and it is one of the five behaviours of an effective change manager: continuously watch for insights from change analytics and process feedback .