At the City of Fremantle, the need to strengthen change capability became more urgent in the wake of COVID. The Council was dealing with employee retention challenges, loss of institutional knowledge, and an operating environment that had changed significantly. As services returned in full, the organization needed to deliver change more effectively without overwhelming staff or disrupting day-to-day work.

Alongside those pressures, the Council was also adapting to new ways of working, changing organizational structures, and a growing need for a more consistent way to understand how staff were experiencing change. The goal was not simply to deliver more initiatives. It was to build a future-fit change capability that could support transformation in a more effective and sustainable way.

The challenge

Kath Philp joined the City of Fremantle with a mandate to help build that capability. The challenge in front of her team was broad: adapt to remote and digital ways of working, support organizational change more consistently, and create a measurable approach to understanding and supporting how staff received change.

The risk was clear. If too much change was introduced too quickly, it could disrupt operational teams, create fatigue, and make it harder for innovation to succeed. The Council needed a better way to track change, understand stakeholder impacts, and bring more structure to the way change was delivered across the organization.

“ChangePlan has been built by people who understand change. It’s incredibly intuitive for anyone who has experience in change management. It’s a no-brainer!”

— Kath Philp, Manager Business Transformation

Why ChangePlan

ChangePlan was recommended to Kath by a former colleague, and its appeal was immediate. The platform felt intuitive and clearly designed for the realities of change management, rather than adapted from a different kind of tool. That mattered for a team looking to establish a more mature, practical, and repeatable way of working.

Onboarding was smooth, and the City’s change team was able to get up and running quickly with configuration and training support. As the team grew, ChangePlan gave them a shared platform to support the way they planned, tracked, and governed change across the Council.

How the team uses it

ChangePlan helped the City of Fremantle improve project tracking and reporting by giving the team a more complete view of change activity and project needs. Features like the Change Canvas made it easier to capture key project elements in one place, while stakeholder and activity reporting gave the team clearer visibility into where change demands were building across the organization.

That visibility became especially valuable when multiple initiatives affected the same teams. In one example, two upcoming projects were both set to impact the finance team. Using ChangePlan’s activity burden reporting, Kath was able to identify time periods where communications, training, and other change activities would place too much demand on those stakeholders. That enabled the team to recommend a minor rescheduling, reducing people risk and helping the projects move forward more smoothly.

“The platform helped manage the activity burden rate, allowing the team to balance the workload, allocate resources effectively and avoid issues of burnout and change fatigue.”

— Kath Philp, Manager Business Transformation

What changed

With ChangePlan in place, the City of Fremantle gained a more consistent and measurable way to manage change. Reporting improved, training planning became more efficient, and the team had better visibility into stakeholder impacts across the organization.

The Council could also see the change impacts of more than 50 projects, making it easier to sequence and reschedule work based on clearer stakeholder data. That helped reduce change collisions, improve project delivery, and strengthen executive understanding of the change roadmap. As a result, the change function gained greater credibility and influence in the broader transformation effort.

For the City of Fremantle, ChangePlan helped replace manual change tracking with a more intuitive, data-driven approach. It gave the team a stronger foundation for decision-making today while also building capability for the future.