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Go-Live Is Only the Beginning: How to Sustain Successful Change Management in Life Sciences
- 11 hours ago
- 5 min read
By Rishi Dixit, Head of Strategic Solutions, Innovation & Partnerships, Atlas
Change Has Five Stages. Most Budgets Cover Three!
Every transformation I’ve worked on has the same five stages hiding inside it, whether anyone named them or not:
1. align people around why the change matters
2. build enough trust that they’ll actually engage
3. teach them what to do
4. get them doing it under real conditions
5. and make it stick.
The ATLAS change adoption model: Align, Trust, Learn, Adopt, Sustain.
Most programs nail the first three. Then go-live happens, the steering committee declares victory, and the last two stages … the ones that actually determine whether anything changed get left to whoever’s still in the room, that usually aren’t the folks who brought the transformation about!
I built a model around this pattern because I was tired of watching it repeat. The ATLAS model: Align, Trust, Learn, Adopt, Sustain. It's not a theory and it's not rocket science, it’s a reminder that some phases need to move beyond PowerPoints. This is what nearly three decades of pain working on some of the largest, most complex transformations at Fortune 500 companies taught me: it's a naming and ownership problem. This is a put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is problem.
Organizations are extremely good at running the first three stages, because those are the ones program/project managers and consultants have always been paid to run: a kickoff, a communications plan, a training curriculum everyone dutifully attends.
Nobody has ever had a job title that says “Head of Adopt” or “VP of Sustain,” so those two stages default to whoever happens to still be around after go-live; which in reality is usually not anyone who is accountable for outcomes in particular.
Before I get to where those two stages go wrong, it's worth naming what Atlas’s ESA model actually stands for, because ESA is the reason ATLAS (Align, Trust, Learn, Adopt, Sustain) works, not just what makes it repeatable.
ESA is an Emotional Intelligence, Social Intelligence, and Agile Approaches that are foundational change design inputs, and not soft add-ons.
Emotional intelligence means treating a change as something people feel before they comply with it: naming fears directly and building trust before asking for behavior change.
Social intelligence means engineering the informal network, and not just the org chart. Identifying all external (intrinsic and extrinsic influences) who actually influences the opinions of human in the middle of the change and equipping/empowering that person, VS just the manager on the reporting line.
Agile approach means the plan itself adapts iteratively as real adoption data comes in, instead of running the same fixed communications calendar regardless of what's actually landing. Persona-based understanding threads through all three: a twenty-year floor supervisor and a headquarters analyst are having two completely different change experiences, with different fears, different trusted voices, and different reasons to say yes.
ATLAS is what turns ESA from a philosophy into a repeatable five-stage progression that teams can run consistently across programs, instead of reinventing persona work and communication design from scratch every time.
In life sciences, that gap isn’t just an efficiency problem. A platform can go live on schedule and still fail to change how people actually work or achieve the intended outcomes. A standardized process can roll out globally and get executed five different ways across five different sites, because nobody owned making it stick.
When adoption stalls inside a regulated environment, it doesn’t just show up as a disappointing usage metric, it shows up as inconsistent data, unclear process ownership, and findings nobody wants during an inspection.
Two of the five ATLAS stages do almost all of the heavy lifting after go-live, and they’re exactly the two nobody invests in.
Adopt is where training turns into behavior, or quietly doesn’t. Training creates awareness; adoption happens when people apply the new way of working under real deadline pressure which is exactly when they’re most tempted to revert to the old one.
The programs that get this right build an emotionally intelligent understanding of the personas impacted during the change. And when these personas are considered in to the support plan from day one: understanding what a twenty-year floor supervisor actually needs to hear, from whom, through which channel, versus what a headquarters analyst needs.
Instead of pointing everyone at the same generic training deck. Get the persona and their requirements wrong and the best-designed process in the world gets quietly ignored by the people who have to run it every day.
Sustain is where governance either evolves or disappears. Most steering committees are built to manage a launch, and they dissolve the moment the launch is declared a success.
What actually needs to survive that transition is a governance model supported by a community that is responsible to continually reflect and improve. And these need to be built for operations, not for a project: with named process owners, a forum that reviews adoption and data quality on a real cadence, and an escalation path that doesn’t require reassembling the original project team every time something breaks.
There’s a line from Kotter’s Leading Change I think about every time a client asks if a transformation is “done” at go-live. He warned that celebrating success too early is like:
John Kotter, Leading Change (1996)
Kotter wrote this in 1996, decades before anyone called it Adopt or Sustain. The stages have new names now. But, the failure mode hasn’t changed at all.
If we plot where the effort actually goes on a typical program and you get the same shape every time:
Illustrative pattern based on Atlas engagement observations, not a specific dataset.
Strong through Align, Trust, and Learn, then a cliff right where Adopt and Sustain begin. That cliff isn’t really only about budget. It’s about the fact that nobody wrote those two stages into anyone’s job description.
The good news is AI/and Innovative tech is here to make some of this easier and digestible, but again the key component is the human in the change. If you’re running a transformation right now, here’s the test: does your plan have a name attached to Adopt, and a different name attached to Sustain? If the honest answer is “the project manager, informally, for a while” or a “Hypercare” – then trust me that is not a plan, that’s a hope.
Where did your last transformation actually struggle? Would love to hear from you!
About the Author
Rishi Dixit is Head of Strategic Solutions, Innovation & Partnerships at Atlas where he helps build new advisory practices, partnerships, products, and solutions that solve complex business challenges. With more than 30 years of experience across life sciences, technology, consumer goods, and global business, Rishi has led large-scale transformations across people, digital, and organizational change.
He is a portfolio, program, and product management expert, change practitioner, mentor, and AI enthusiast who believes the hardest challenges are rarely just technology problems. They are people problems shaped by technology, process, and change.
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