From Resistance to Readiness: Tips for Overcoming Roadblocks to Change | Propulsion 2025

In this engaging Propulsion session, veteran PLM consultants Tina Murray and September Higham explore one of the thorniest challenges in digital transformation: organizational resistance to change. Drawing from decades of experience with PLM implementations—including Agile to Propel migrations—they share stories of what goes wrong when adoption falters and how executive sponsorship can make or break a project.

With real-world examples from both successful and stalled rollouts, Tina and September outline the most common roadblocks—overwhelmed teams, scope creep, technical surprises—and offer tactical remedies to help companies navigate them. Whether you're preparing for your first PLM deployment or optimizing an existing one, this session will sharpen your change management approach and show you how to lead with clarity, conviction, and results.

KEY INSIGHTS

TINA:
"We were lucky to have a very strong executive sponsor—high up in the organization with a lot of clout. We invited him to the next meeting with the ECAD team, and he listened as if he didn’t know anything. They spilled their guts—saying they couldn’t do this, they didn’t like that, and they weren’t going to do it. And he said, 'You will get on board.' It had to be all or nothing. It wasn’t acceptable for three-quarters of the organization to implement while one part stayed in the dark ages. Everybody was expected to come along."

"The executive sponsor was constructive in criticism but generous in praise, and it became the gold standard by which future projects would be measured. It became a gold star in their portfolio—not just because we were a partner (they had multiple partners on the project), but because of how they, as an organization, improved themselves and everything that followed."

SEPTEMBER:

"On this project, adoption was waning, and after about a year, you could no longer trust the information in the PLM system—it might be up to date, or it might not. Something critical was missing from our equation. It was a strong executive sponsor. We didn’t engage the most important resource in the implementation—a strong in-house executive sponsor who could bring everyone together and ensure adoption was happening as it should."

"To sum it up: enterprise software is pricey—but the price of having an executive sponsor is priceless."

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