Study guide
13.3 Step 1 Continued: Gap Analysis, Impact Profiles and Monitoring
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
13.3 Step 1 Continued: Gap Analysis, Impact Profiles and Monitoring
Key Takeaways Explain This Topic AI
McKinsey 7-S can be used to undertake a gap analysis between the current as-is and future to-be organisational context
Change activities must address and support the identified gap and any barriers to the change
Impact profiles recognise that individuals and groups experience their own change journeys, affected in different ways and by differing amounts
The change team co-defines individual impact profiles with stakeholders and uses them to customise communication, engagement and learning interventions
Change managers establish feedback loops and monitor impact profiles over time, and regularly reviewing who participates mitigates group think and bias
Last updated: September 2026
Sub-step 1.3: Undertaking a gap analysis
The McKinsey 7-S model can be used to undertake a gap analysis . When assessing the current ('as is') and the future organisational context ('to be') , it is important to ensure that the change activities address and support the identified 'gap' and any 'barriers' to the change .
The method is straightforward: describe each of the seven elements as it is today, describe each as it needs to be after the change, and the difference is the gap the change must close.
- Element As is To be Gap the change must close
- Strategy Regional autonomy on service standards Single group standard Alignment of regional objectives
Structure Approvals within each region Central approval above a threshold New approval route and authority levels
Systems Three regional processes One common process Process redesign and retraining
Shared values "Our region knows its market" "One consistent customer experience" A genuine values shift, not a process change
- Style Directive regional leadership Collaborative cross-region working Leadership development
- Staff Duplicated regional roles Consolidated central function Restructure and redeployment
- Skills Regional product expertise Group-wide product knowledge Cross-training
The discipline the test imposes is that every gap needs a change activity , and every change activity should be traceable to a gap. Activities with no gap behind them are waste; gaps with no activity against them are where the change will fail. Working the table both ways is one of the fastest quality checks available on a change plan.
Sub-step 1.4: Determining impact profiles
Understanding who is impacted and how is essential to effective change management. Individuals and groups will experience their own change journeys, affecting people in different ways and by differing amounts.
Having identified, segmented and mapped stakeholder groups:
The change team will look to gain an awareness of individual impact profiles by co-defining this with stakeholders
They will use this awareness to customise communication, engagement and learning interventions to support change readiness. This could be as part of defining the size and scale of the change, creating the vision, or other discovery activities
Co-defining rather than assessing
The word co-defining carries real weight. Impact profiles are built with stakeholders, not about them. There are three reasons this is better than desk assessment:
Accuracy. People know their own work. The change team's model of what a role involves is always simpler than the role.
Legitimacy. An impact profile a group helped construct is one they will not dispute later.
Engagement. Co-defining is itself an engagement activity — it protects autonomy in SCARF terms and moves people up the commitment escalator while producing the analysis.
Using the profiles
The purpose is to customise communication, engagement and learning interventions . This is what makes segmentation operational: a group with a heavy skills impact and light process impact needs a different intervention mix from a group with the reverse. Without profiles, change teams deliver the same intervention set to everyone and are surprised by uneven adoption.
Monitoring impact profiles
Change managers or change teams will establish feedback loops and monitor impact profiles over time. As the change network identifies new impacts or stakeholder groups, the profile may change.
CM3 adds an important governance point: regularly reviewing who participates in this process also mitigates the risk of group think and bias, promoting constructive challenge. A standing group that assesses impacts for eighteen months converges on a shared view and stops seeing what it has stopped looking for. Rotating participation is a cheap corrective.
Feedback loops and discovery techniques
The examples CM3 gives:
- Technique What it provides
- Qualitative feedback from change networks Trusted, contextual information from inside each area
Participatory engagements , such as lean coffee sessions Open-agenda discussion where people raise what actually matters to them
Temperature / pulse checks , such as surveys or interactive polling tools Quick, repeatable readings that show movement over time
Culture assessments Deeper insight into whether the change is compatible with underlying norms and assumptions
System data including employee engagement analytics, such as intranet usage, click rates or task completion time stamps Behavioural evidence rather than reported opinion
The last row is worth dwelling on. System data measures what people do rather than what they say, and it is often already being collected. Task completion time stamps, for example, show the learning dip directly: completion times rise after go-live and fall as competence builds. If they do not fall, something is wrong that no survey would have revealed.
The strongest monitoring uses both — qualitative sources to explain what is happening and quantitative sources to establish that it is. This anticipates the change analytics material, where the mix of qualitative and quantitative data shifts across the change lifecycle.