How to budget for organizational change: A leader's guide

"I wasn't involved in building the project budget. It was assumed our internal communications and training professionals would be able to support us. But after talking through the scope of the project, we now know that's impossible. We don't have a change line item in our budget. What's the bare minimum we can spend?"

This is one of the most common conversations I have with leaders about to undertake a major technology transformation effort, such as a Workday HCM deployment.

I've led organizational change for 7 separate Workday deployments covering all of the human capital modules (Core HR, Recruiting, Talent Management, Benefits Administration, Payroll Solutions, Time tracking and Absence, Workforce Planning and Analytics) as well as finance modules (Workday Financial Management and Procurement) alongside four different system implementation partners and across global audiences in nearly 20 countries.

All clients brought me back for successive phases of their Workday journey, which means I've seen how organizations mature through the platform over time, not just how they launch it. The budget guidance below is drawn directly from that experience.

The short answer: 10 percent of your overall budget should be allocated to the people side of a transformation program. 

Gartner recommends 15 percent.

The industry average is 5 percent.

But the number is only the starting point. The more important question is what you're actually investing in. A change budget is not a line item for communications and training materials. It's an investment in readiness: In creating the conditions and designing the structures that allow your people to adopt new behaviors.

That, my friends, is what you're really driving towards: Behavioral adoption.

Because the 5 percent you spend on the people side will feel like a steal if your program becomes among the 30 percent that actually achieves its adoption goals. 

Understanding that distinction changes how you defend the number when leadership pushes back and where you actually allocate the spending to maximize impact. Here are the three steps I use to help clients build a change budget. 

Step 1: Understand the scope of behavioral change: people, process, and technology

The most common mistake in change budgeting is treating the technology as the primary change. It isn't. Process and policy alignment come first. What's changing about how work gets done, and what policies govern it? These changes require communication, documentation, and often legally required notifications well before the technology goes live.

The people who perform each step in the process come next. Who is affected? How are their roles changing? What do they need to believe and do differently? Across all of the people impacts, how do we prioritize where to spend our time and effort to get them to behave differently?

The technology comes last. It delivers the future state, but only if the process and people work are done first. Skipping that work creates chaos at go-live. Stakeholders are surprised by changes they weren't prepared for. Resistance surfaces at the worst possible moment. Core users don't understand their new roles. That is why 70 percent of transformations still fail.

When that happens, the feedback you'll hear: "I didn't know I was supposed to do that now."

For a Workday HCM deployment, high-impact changes cluster predictably across all three areas.

People:

• Introducing employee and manager self-service shifts transaction ownership from HR to individuals — a significant behavioral change for both groups.
• Creating or automating the information delivery process for HR, such as adding a centralized HR service center for employees or even HR professionals to get questions answered quickly
• Establishing Centers of Excellence within HR changes how expertise is organized and how HR team members work with one another
• Broader data and analytics capabilities shift HR toward a more proactive function, and create new expectations from leaders who now have greater visibility into people data.

Process:

• Aligning common business processes across a decentralized organization is often the heaviest lift.
• Policy changes: paid time off, payroll dates, compliance notifications, etc. can constitute a project of their own, with legally required communications that must precede the technology rollout.  

Technology:

• Role-based security assignments
• Customization beyond standard configuration based on organizational-specific roles or processes
• Access for manufacturing or field employees adds complexity and cost to supporting the behavior change adoption efforts because additional steps or even technical infrastructure might be needed (i.e. kiosks in manufacturing settings).

Each of these categories can represent more than 100 hours of work. High complexity across two or more of these three categories is a signal to adjust your budget upward from the 10 percent benchmark.

Step 2: Account for your available resources

Once you understand the scope, the question is who's going to do it. Most organizations have some internal capacity: communications professionals, training developers, and HR generalists who can absorb discrete tasks. A combination of internal and external resources significantly reduces cost while managing risk. Concentrating all change work in a single resource, even a capable one, can be risky because the workload peaks sharply in the final weeks before and after go-live.

One underused option worth building into your resource plan: investing in developing your internal team's change leadership capability rather than supplementing it indefinitely with external help. A growth opportunity like a Workday deployment comes along once in a career, which makes it a perfect on-the-job learning opportunity in change leadership.  The changecapable Leadership Program is built for this: it develops influencing skills through guided application on your actual project, which means your internal resources contribute more effectively to this deployment and carry genuine capability into the next one. The team also has access to me, and my extensive Workday expertise, which can shift your resource calculation meaningfully.

Other external resources worth factoring in include your system implementer's change toolkit and, for Workday specifically, the Workday Adoption Toolkit, a solid foundation of communication and training templates that meaningfully accelerates materials development. Expect to customize and supplement; the toolkit is a starting point, not a comprehensive behavior change strategy.

If your internal team can support training delivery, communication distribution, or translation, you can adjust downward. If you have an HR professional who can quarterback and coordinate the effort, the hard costs come down, so long as you also adjust workloads for that person. A planning assumption of roughly 150 absorbed hours is reasonable for mid-complexity deployments with access to toolkit templates.

Factors that will push your budget upward:

• Limited internal infrastructure (no intranet, no learning management system accessible to all employees)
• Highly decentralized organizational structures with dispersed decision rights that require broader stakeholder engagement
• High volume of process and policy changes requiring original content development.  

Step 3: The behavioral wildcard: culture

This is where most budget conversations go wrong. Leaders underestimate culture because it's the hardest factor to see and the hardest to price. But culture is the variable that determines how much everything else costs.

The same change in a high-trust, change-capable organization requires a fraction of the investment it requires in an organization carrying the weight of failed projects, low leader adaptability, or limited capacity to absorb new demands.

Questions worth asking honestly before you finalize your budget:

• When did your organization last successfully deliver a change of this scope? •
• What's the history with major projects?
• Do people carry long memories of initiatives that didn't go well?
• Do your leaders demonstrate adaptability and optimism under pressure or do they signal their own ambivalence to the people around them?
• Is the organization at capacity right now?
• How hard will it be to secure the attention and time of key stakeholders?  
• How decentralized are you? Decisions that require broad socialization take longer and cost more.
• What happens when deadlines are missed? Is there a culture of accountability?

These questions point to the broad indicators of how ready your organization is for this change, and the degree of effort required to get it ready. The changecapable^TM Influence Stack offers a useful framework for understanding where your leaders are in that maturation process, and what it takes to move them forward.

If your organization scores low on several of these dimensions, adjust your budget upward. More importantly, consider what it would take to build the underlying leadership capability at least within your core project team leadership or dedicated internal change leader, because no budget level compensates for leaders who aren't equipped to lead change.

The takeaway

A change budget is a people and organizational readiness budget. Start with 10 percent of total project cost, then adjust based on the scope of people and process change, available resources, and the degree of cultural challenge your organization faces.

If your leaders are the variable you're most uncertain about, that's the right place to start. Inspired by Fear: Becoming a Courageous Change Leader provides a foundational view of what a transformational change, such as a Workday deployment, feels like for change leaders and the project team.

And The changecapable Leadership Program takes it further in two ways: as a diagnostic that gives HR leaders a clear-eyed view of their organization's change readiness, along with a behavioral science-based design that helps drive adoption of the most important behaviors while informing additional investments.

Updated May 2026 to reframe the change budget as a behavioral readiness investment, expand the culture section with the changecapable Influence Stack, and update offers and cross-references.

Related reading

• How to improve transformation execution: 5 proven strategies. Five case studies showing exactly what happens when change budgets are too thin and the targeted strategies avoid those costs
• What's different about Workday that changes your change management: how Workday's structure affects the scope and complexity of your change investment
• Your training plan is reaching only 10% of learners, and what that means for how you allocate your budget
• The Influence Stack: the change leadership maturation process