Field Note #4 - Change Management is About Reconciling Expectations

System capability, legal constraints, and staff expectations need to be aligned early

In justice technology initiatives, “change management” is often misunderstood.

It is treated as training schedules, communications plans, or readiness checklists layered on top of an implementation that is already underway or is subject to a plan that did not consider the necessary alignments. When projects struggle, the diagnosis I routinely hear is that “change management started too late” or (my favorite) “users resisted change.”

In reality, trust diminishes much earlier - and for a different reason.

Change management fails when expectations diverge: when what the system can actually do, what the law requires, and what staff believe will happen are never reconciled explicitly, for all to see. Once those expectations drift apart, no amount of training can restore confidence and get users excited.

Why This Matters to Court Leaders

Courts operate under public scrutiny, statutory constraints, and time-critical proceedings. When expectations are misaligned:

• Staff feel misled or unprepared

• Clerks and Judges lose confidence in the system’s reliability

• Workarounds emerge to protect proceedings

• Adoption slows - not because people resist change, but because their trust is low and they are managing risk

From the court’s perspective, the most damaging outcome is not delay. Clerks and Judges know how to deal with delay. It is loss of operational trust and confidence.

The Core Pattern

In many implementations I have seen:

• Leadership assumes the system will support existing practices

• Delivery teams assume practices will adapt to system constraints

• Staff assume features demonstrated early will behave the same way under real conditions

• Then, material constraints are discovered after configuration decisions are made

Perhaps, each assumption is reasonable on its own. In concert, however, they create expectation gaps that surface as frustration, rework, and resistance.

Change management is the discipline of making those assumptions visible early, while there is still room and time to adjust.

Where Expectations Commonly Drift

1. System Capability vs. Demonstration

Early demos create optimism. Later, staff discover:

• Concurrency limits

• Usability constraints

• Sequencing requirements

• Differences between “possible” and “practical”

Without early reconciliation, courts feel the system was oversold - even when it was not.

2. Legal and Rule Constraints vs. Configuration

Statutes, court rules, and local practices:

• May restrict automation

• Require specific steps or timing

• Limit delegation or parallel action

When these constraints are discovered late, courts must choose between:

• Reconfiguring the system, or

• Bending operations around them

Neither builds confidence.

3. Operational Reality vs. Project Plans

Project plans often assume:

• Linear workflows

• A degree of uniformity in practices

• Stable requirements

Court operations rarely offer these.

What Change Management Actually Is

Effective change management is not persuasion. It is the reconciliation of expectations.

That requires:

• Explicitly surfacing what the system will not do

• Explaining why certain practices must change and how

• Showing how legal constraints shape behavior

• Validating which expectations are reasonable and which are not

When done early, this builds credibility - even when an answer is “no.”

What Helps (Observed Pattern)

• Aligning system capability, legal constraints, and operational reality early

• Using real workflows and real data to set expectations

• Defining “done” in operational, not technical, terms

• Surfacing limitations before staff discover them under pressure

• Treating change management as continuous sense-making, not a mere phase or "training"

• Involving translators who can reconcile legal, operational, and technical viewpoints

What Hurts (Observed Pattern)

• Equating training with change management

• Relying on optimistic demos or untested assumptions when setting expectations

• Deferring legal or rule analysis until later stages in the implementation

• Assuming resistance is cultural rather than rational

• Discovering limitations during live proceedings

Leading Signals to Watch

• Staff saying “that’s not how we were told it would work”

• Increasing reliance on paper or shadow systems

• Hesitation to use features that technically exist

• Growing gap between reported progress and actual usage during the implementation

These signals indicate expectation gaps - not attitude problems.

Takeaway for Leaders

Change management is not about getting people to accept a system.

It is about ensuring that what people expect, what the law allows or prescribes, and what the system can actually do are aligned before those expectations harden.

When expectations are reconciled early, courts have the capacity to adapt - even to difficult change. When they are not, friction increases, and recovery becomes progressively expensive.