By Molly Lebowitz (Senior Director, Tech Industry) and Hunter Kafcsak (Director, Emerging Markets) at Propeller

In the coming year, we expect to see IT leaders focusing on three areas where effective change will be absolutely essential-shifting to product-led IT, rationalizing AI infrastructure investments, and optimizing workforce productivity. As such, change management may very well be one of IT's biggest challenges for 2025.

Each of these IT focus areas require an intentional approach to change management to not only implement these shifts effectively but also to align teams, encourage adoption, and sustain momentum. Without a dedicated focus on change management, these strategic moves may fall short of their full potential.

Here's what leaders need to consider as they manage these changes in the year ahead.

Product-Led IT: Shifting from Projects to Products

In 2025, more IT teams will continue to move away from a program or project-led approach and toward a product-driven model. This approach, which was proven effective in consumer software, requires IT to focus on platform ownership, continuous improvement, and enhanced business partner collaboration rather than waterfall delivery.

How to manage this change effectively:

• Assess product management maturity: Assess your organization's current capabilities in product management and identify gaps that could hinder the transition.
• Pilot product-driven approaches: Test out your organization's readiness for this new approach by piloting it with a few select applications and teams. (Some teams are likely following product principles already).
• Advance product management maturity: Invest in training, develop product management capabilities, create a Center of Excellence for product managers to unify practices, and adopt tools that prioritize user feedback.
• Track operational and user impact: Focus on measuring the impact of this change through metrics like operational efficiency and user satisfaction to ensure continuous improvement.

AI Rationalization: Moving from Experimentation to Strategic Investment

The rush to adopt AI has left many organizations with a sprawling ecosystem of tools and platforms delivering variable impact. As companies aim to rein in their AI investments and focus on high-value applications, orchestrating AI across the organization will be a top priority. Organizations can learn from what they've already deployed to scale efforts and refine their cost forecasts. This involves assessing which AI platforms are truly delivering an appropriate return on investment, identifying which use cases benefit from AI, rationalizing the core infrastructure to deploy and maintain AI capability sets, and developing a holistic picture of AI cost models for optimization.

How to manage this change effectively:

• Conduct an AI inventory and audit: Take stock of AI tools and platforms to identify which provide real value. Involve stakeholders in the audit to build consensus around which initiatives to keep, adjust, or divest.
• Decide your preferred cost model: Consumption-based models are common with AI applications. They can provide cost flexibility, making it easier to adjust investments based on actual usage versus costly per-user licenses.
• Focus on value and ROI: Prioritize tools and platforms that offer clear returns, and consider universal sandboxes for rapid use case experimentation. Ensuring that AI investments are aligned with strategic goals and deliver tangible ROI can help you avoid the pitfalls of "AI-washing" while reducing costs.

Talent Optimization: Realigning Human Capital for Productivity

Companies are seeing real productivity gains from AI tools, and this is influencing their talent strategies. To move forward in 2025, they will need to decide how to balance human capital with technology, outsourcing, and offshoring to drive efficiency. Cost reduction doesn't have to mean layoffs-it can mean refocusing human capital on higher-value skill sets.

How to manage this change effectively:

• Assess workforce capabilities: Evaluate your existing workforce against the skill sets needed for future success, such as AI, machine learning, and cloud computing.
• Invest in training: Provide upskilling programs to help employees transition into new roles, and communicate career growth opportunities.
• Explore hybrid workforce models: Explore outsourcing and offshoring for roles that can be efficiently managed remotely while upskilling the remaining workforce to align with higher-value functions.
  

Smoothing the Process of Change in 2025 and Beyond

Each of these IT transformations share a reliance on change management. It's about guiding teams with transparency, communication, and strategy. It will require not only a cultural shift, but a behavioral one as well-teams will need to embrace accountability and align with business goals to deliver real value. And it must be a collaboration across business, finance, IT, and HR; your success will depend on all of these functions working together.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Molly Lebowitz, Senior Director

A strategic leader, practiced engineer, and critical thinker, Molly Lebowitz is a senior director at Propeller, a management consultancy that helps leading organizations thrive in change. She has extensive experience helping technology organizations tackle large-scale, complex operational challenges and transformations. From operational excellence to market intelligence, strategic planning, and executive-level decision-making, Molly is adept at helping leaders in the tech industry energize, reconfigure and up-level their teams and business. Her experience in software, hardware, media, and online travel brings the expertise and perspective to drive transformative results. She holds a bachelor's degree in engineering from Cornell University. 

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Hunter is a Director at Propeller with over a decade of experience in retail and digital transformation.  He advises technology executives and leaders on IT strategy, organizational effectiveness, and the product model to optimize their organizations and strategic investments.