among different agencies. If decision-making is located at the wrong level, difficult challenges of coordination or resourcing can arise, prompting major disruption during implementation. Equally, it may be possible that front-line service providers who interact daily with the public experience more direct pressure for change than their superiors. In this instance, project governance that is designed specifically to give lower levels of employees a voice and to facilitate means by which they can exercise power to exert pressure on higher levels of government might be useful.

# Engagement and communication with stakeholders

“Engagement and communication with stakeholders” encompasses two aspects: the first is ensuring that employees know about a change, and the second is that they regard it as something they will accept or, preferably, promote. These two aspects have sometimes been conflated in traditional CM approaches, where communication strategies have been formulated on the assumption that once employees properly understand a change, they will inevitably regard it as beneficial to themselves.

Effective engagement and communication is more usefully seen as a means of devising and circulating a narrative which constructs the desired change as a mutually beneficial common goal, given the particular material and normative context of the public service agency. As in the case of leadership, above, this requires a deeper analysis of the normative frameworks informing institutional culture than is implied by the notion of incentives. It also requires the exercise of power, since it requires encouraging a range of actors at different levels to reorient not only their actions but also their beliefs about the relationship of their work to a broader set of institutional or social goals.

Furthermore, effective change management may require the reorganization of channels of communication within an institution over the long term. This again requires exercise of power, particularly in contexts where personalist relationships are important. Change managers need to implement strategies that can “break the ice” between different groups that would normally interact rarely; it may also imply developing close practices of day to day communication between groups that regard one another as competitors or even enemies. Furthermore, promoting such channels of communication between groups that might share a tactical interest in change, even if for different reasons, can be useful in leveraging their combined influence. Political economy analysis of the functioning of an institution can assist in determining how these kinds of relationships work, enabling design of change management tools that are realistic about both the potential problems and opportunities inherent in a radical reordering of institutional relationships, about the amount of power that will be needed to implement change successfully, and about the types of actors who might be able to exert the necessary level of pressure, whether from above, below, or from outside the organization altogether.

# Organizational alignment

Organizational alignment is another important element in change management, and it refers to the process by which organizational practices are reoriented to reflect the new way of working. For example, shifting from manual to automated processes requires a change in work practices, organizational structures and job descriptions, which need to be appropriately realigned. Transformational change in the structure, function, and culture of the ministry can spark major resistance if it has distributive consequences for specific stakeholders. In our case, FMIS implementation 9