Starting a new change initiative can often be overwhelming!
The Initiative setup feature helps you get started fast.
It guides you to:
- Assess the level of change effort the project requires
- Consider the project and change approach you’ll take
You’ll get two PPT outputs to help you make the case for change:
- A Change effort assessment report that justifies the level of change management support the project needs and explains what the result means.
- An Initiative brief one-pager that gets everyone aligned fast. It’s ready to share with leaders, the PM team, sponsor, or anyone else who needs to get up to speed.
If your organization chooses to use the optional AI features, you can upload project documents and get helpful suggestions along the way too.
This user guide walks through the Initiative setup feature, including the backend settings that allow your organization’s ChangePlan administrator configure and tailor the feature.
Who it's for and when to use it
Initiative Setup is built for change managers, project managers, sponsors, and non-specialists who need to bring a project into ChangePlan and get moving quickly.
Use it:
- At the outset of a new initiative or during early planning.
- When you're bringing an in-flight project into ChangePlan.
- When you want a fast, defensible first pass that you can socialise with stakeholders.
The information you add in the Initiative setup steps feeds the rest of your initiative. Information flows through to the initiative’s impacts, audiences, activities, and reporting.
Where it fits, and a note on AI
Initiative Setup sits alongside your existing change planning; it doesn't replace any of it. It gives newcomers and non-specialists an easy way in, and helps you get some quick wins instead of facing a blank screen.
There's an optional AI feature. When your administrator has switched it on, ChangePlan reads the documents you upload and drafts suggested answers as you go. Every suggestion is a reviewable first draft, never a final answer — you can accept, edit, or replace any of them. If AI is switched off, the feature works exactly the same way; you just fill in the answers yourself.
Before you start
You'll get sharper, faster results if you have your project material to hand, for example:
- A business case, project brief, or scope document
- Project plans or schedules
- A stakeholder or impacted-audience list (e.g. an Excel sheet)
- Any governance documents
More and better input produces better suggestions. That said, you can still proceed without documents and answer everything yourself. Most people finish in around 10–15 minutes when their documents are ready.
The three setup panels
When you create a new initiative, three panels appear at the top of your initiative dashboard, under Initiative Setup:
- Upload documents
- Assess change effort
- Create initiative brief
You can click into any of the three, but we recommend starting with Upload documents so the system has material to generate suggestions from.
A few things worth knowing about the setup dialogue:
- A welcome screen (below) greets you the first time. You can toggle it off with the checkbox so it doesn't show for future initiatives.
- A stepper (navigation menu) across the top lets you jump between the three steps in any order — you don't have to work through them linearly.
- Blue question marks appear throughout. Click one to open a side drawer with helpful inspiration, ideas, and answers to questions you might have. You can also open it from the question mark in the top right of each screen.
Step 1: Upload documents
This first step invites you to upload documents related to your initiative. These might be documents your project team gave you, things you've already created, or a spreadsheet of impacted stakeholders — any file type is fine.
- Click to choose your files and add them to the initiative.
- The system uploads them (you can access them later on the Documents page).
- Click Continue. If AI is enabled, ChangePlan analyses the documents in the background and creates suggestions for both the Change Effort Assessment and the Initiative Brief.
Step 2: The Change Effort Assessment
The Change Effort Assessment is a quick, high-level read on the overall level of change support your project needs. It's just 12 questions and gives you a defensible first pass at the change risk.
Each question shows the question itself, some helper text explaining what it means, and five options to choose from, each with its own descriptive label.
If AI is on, the suggested option is outlined in purple. Hover over the suggestion to see the reasoning behind it. You can click Continue with suggestion to accept it, or pick any other option yourself.
Two dimensions
The 12 questions cover two dimensions:
- The first six relate to the scale of change (this may be named differently in your instance).
- The second six relate to stakeholder readiness risk (again, this label may differ in your instance).
For the options, green (left) means less change-management support is needed and red (right) means more support is needed, so answers on the left are lower effort and answers on the right are higher effort.
Your result
Once you've answered all 12 questions, ChangePlan calculates a t-shirt size for the initiative — Small, Medium, Large, or Extra Large — and shows a heat map on the right.
From here you can download a PowerPoint of the Change Effort summary, review your responses (using the right-facing arrow, where you can see each answer and the reasoning behind it), and change any response — the heat map and the size update in real time, and you can regenerate the PowerPoint to match.
💡 Tip: You can correct an answer the moment you spot it, no need to wait until the end. While working through the Change Effort Assessment, open Review responses and click directly on any of the five score circles for a question to change it. The result tile and heat map update immediately, right there in the flow.
Set the size manually
You can also set the size manually to override the calculated score, or set it directly instead of answering the 12 questions if you already know the size. Overriding replaces the assessed result; you can always revert to the assessed size to bring back the score based on your answers.
Why it matters: the single view of change
Completing the assessment — even as a bare minimum — surfaces your initiative on the single view of change, a rolled-up heat map across all your initiatives (found in the Change Effort report). You can filter it by portfolio or other categories. It shows where each project sits across the two dimensions, the proportion of Small, Medium, Large, and Extra Large initiatives, and a collision timeline showing when initiatives go live alongside their overall change effort. Those 12 questions
Step 3: Create the Initiative Brief
The Initiative Brief is your chance to think through the project and your overall change approach. The output is a one-page brief you can use to create fast alignment and give everyone confidence that change is being managed thoughtfully. It's ideal to share with stakeholders, sponsors, leaders, and executives.
There are three parts.
Part 1: Project overview
Six questions about the project. AI suggests an answer for each; you can accept it, edit it, delete it and write your own, or revert to the suggestion.
- Question 1 asks you to describe the project in a single sentence. This shapes how you'll communicate the project to stakeholders and seeds the rest of ChangePlan's suggestions.
- Question 2 asks what problems the project is solving. You get multi-select options (purple stars mark the suggested ones — hover for more detail) plus a field to add anything in your own words.
- Question 3 asks what will actually change for the people doing the work.
- The remaining questions continue in the same style.
There's a character limit on the text fields (a suggested guide, since this content is exported to your PowerPoint). ChangePlan saves up to 1,000 characters, though not all of it will fit on the one-page export.
Part 2: Your approach to change
Five questions about how you'll approach the change.
- Question 1: what change-management approach you'll take. Choose up to three of the five options, or select "not decided yet" if you're still early — that's completely normal.
- Question 2: communications — how you'll keep people informed and hear back from them.
- Question 3: the key messages people need to hear. Suggestions run up to 150 characters; we recommend up to three key messages at this stage. These messages also feed ChangePlan's suggestions for your change activity plan later.
- Question 4: your training approach.
- Question 5: adoption — how you'll sustain it after go-live.
Remember, this is iterative. You can always come back and edit any answer later; it's not a one-time-only opportunity.
Part 3: Governance
The third part covers governance. You can skip this section if your initiative isn't Large or Extra Large, though it can be useful to work through anyway. You're also able to skip individual questions as you go. Finally, you can add any governance documents you have — these help ChangePlan create better suggestions down the line.
Review and create
After the three parts, a review page lets you jump back into any section. When you're ready, click Create Initiative Brief. ChangePlan generates the one-page brief, which you can download.
Finishing the Initiative setup
Once all three steps are done, click What's next (below) then Finish and close to return to the dashboard.
Once the Initiative setup is completed, the Initiative setup three panels (below) no longer appear, however all of the information you’ve entered remains accessible from the left-side menu (see After setup).
Before completion
After completion
Access your initiative setup data via these pages:
- Documents — all files uploaded, plus files ChangePlan has generated. Click a file to download it, or delete it if you wish. (There's no in-app file preview yet — clicking downloads the file.)
- Change Effort — reopen the assessment any time. Your answers sit across two tabs (questions 1–6 and 7–12). Change a response and the heat map and size update in real time; re-download the PowerPoint to match.
- Initiative Brief — update any of your responses and re-download the brief.
What to do next in ChangePlan
Initiative Setup feeds the rest of your change planning.
From the panels on your initiative dashboard, you can go on to
- add audiences affected
- add change impacts
- consider change-management risks
- plan audience-facing change management activities
Working with the PowerPoint outputs
Both the Change Effort summary and the Initiative Brief download as fully editable PowerPoint slides — active slides, not images.
- They adopt your theme automatically. Fonts and colours adjust to the selected theme, so it's easy to bring them onto your corporate branding.
- You can edit everything. Click to adjust text, move things around, or open a text box to add your own commentary or notes.
- Our tip for branding: copy the slide and paste it into one of your own PowerPoint master documents, then apply your colour and theming there.
- Regenerate any time. Edit your responses and re-download to update the outputs.
- Track changes over time. ChangePlan stamps each export with the date and time, so if you revise your assessment you can compare the delta by saving both files.
For administrators: configuring the Change effort assessment
Admins can tailor the Change Effort Assessment so it's consistent and harmonized across all practitioners and projects.
Configuration lives in the Settings page (accessible via the black menu on the left), under the Assessment tab.
You can adjust:
- Question text — edit any of the 12 questions (up to 200 characters each). Use Revert to default to restore the original wording.
- Helper text — the explanatory text shown beneath each question to guide the answer (optional, up to 400 characters).
- Option labels — the labels for each of the five options per question (up to 60 characters each; all five must be set). Editing is done via the pencil icon.
- Dimension (axis) names — rename the two dimensions used for the assessment. By default the Y-axis is Scale of change and the X-axis is Readiness risk (up to 60 characters each).
- Size result text — the helper text shown for each t-shirt size (Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large, up to 500 characters each). This text appears on the PowerPoint export, so you can tailor it to your organisation's approach for handling each size.
The assessment is designed to track two dimensions about the project.
The default dimensions are:
- Scale of change occuring (the Y axis)
- Stakeholder readiness risk (the X axis)
The assessment has 12 questions in total, 6 questions for each of the two dimensions.
Each question has 5 Likert scale options (these counts are fixed).
Making changes to the Change effort assessment
- Updating a question is retroactive (it also updates that question for existing initiatives)
- Questions can't be reordered automatically
- Regional localisation isn't supported yet
For Administrators: Turning AI on or off
AI analysis and suggestions are optional and are default turned off.
When it's on, AI-drafted suggestions appear clearly labelled (outlined or starred in purple) throughout setup. You can switch it on or off for your organisation at any time in Settings.
Common questions
- Is AI required? No. AI assistance is optional and admin-controlled. Everything works the same way without it; you just enter answers yourself.
- Are the outputs editable? Yes. Both PowerPoints are fully editable and adopt your theme. Edit your responses and regenerate any time.
- Do I have to upload documents? No — setup works without them, though documents produce better suggestions.
- Can I change my answers later? Yes. Setup is iterative; reopen the Change Effort assessment or the Initiative Brief from the left-side menu any time.
- Where do settings like dimension names live? In the admin Settings area, not at the individual initiative level.
- Can I hide the guided panel? Yes, the welcome screen can be toggled off for future initiatives.