Three Project Types That Qualify for the CCMP® Application

Version française : Trois types de projets admissibles au dossier CCMP®

By Marc-André Rochefort, Eng., MBA, CCMP®, MCMP™, Prosci® certified, founder of Leanova Academy, an ACMP® Qualified Education Provider™.
Last reviewed: October 2026

Disclosure: Leanova Academy sells CCMP® training and application coaching, so we have a stake in this topic. ACMP® rules below link to official sources so you can check them yourself.

Key takeaways

• A system migration, a reorganization and a culture program can all count as change management experience for the CCMP® application. The work just has to map to the ACMP® Standard's process groups.
• You don't need "change" in your job title, and none of the three practitioners described here had "change manager" as a formal title.
• The three examples are illustrative composites. Their hour ranges of 600 to 900, 350 to 500, and 800 to 1,200 hours are plausible estimates, not figures from real CCMP® submissions.
• In our experience, most applications that come back struggle with translating experience into the Standard's process groups, not with the experience itself.
• The application asks you to answer three of five essay questions, in 500 words or fewer each, and only the first three responses are reviewed.
• Leanova Academy's CCMP® Application Coaching Pack (US$590) reviews your real projects, and it's also part of the CCMP® Coaching Bundle (US$1,195).

You don't need "change" in your job title to have experience that counts for the CCMP® application. What you need is work that maps to the ACMP® Standard's process groups: evaluating change impact and organizational readiness, formulating the change management strategy, developing the change management plan, executing it, and closing the change management effort. We built three examples to show how very different kinds of work translate into application language. One is a system migration, one a reorganization, and one a culture program. They're composites that don't reproduce any real candidate's file, and the hours are plausible estimates rather than figures from an actual submission.

Example one: an ERP migration

A mid-size logistics company replaces its legacy warehouse management system with a cloud ERP platform. Around 400 users across four distribution centers are affected, and the project takes fourteen months from planning to full adoption.

The practitioner's official title is "Change and Training Lead." They aren't the project manager, and they don't own the technical implementation. Their scope is the human side of the rollout. First they assess how ready each distribution center is, given its history with earlier systems and the way its local leadership works. Then they build a training curriculum for four different user roles. A communication campaign follows across four sites that run different shift patterns. Once each site goes live, they track adoption through system usage data.

In Standard terms, this project touches all five process groups. The readiness assessment across sites that started from genuinely different places sits in Evaluate Change Impact and Organizational Readiness. Sequencing a phased rollout by each site's readiness, instead of picking a single go-live date, belongs to Formulate the Change Management Strategy. The training curriculum and the communication campaign are Develop the Change Management Plan, and delivering them is Execute the Change Management Plan. Tracking adoption against usage metrics defined for each site, then handing ownership over to operations, belongs to Close the Change Management Effort.

This role was worked mostly part-time, alongside other responsibilities, over fourteen months. A plausible estimate lands between 600 and 900 hours. Where it falls depends on how much training the practitioner delivered personally rather than coordinated through others. To see how those hours fit the overall eligibility rules, read CCMP® Certification Requirements in 2026: Hours, Experience and Fees. If you're writing up a project like this, skip the system name and the user count. What matters is what you personally assessed, designed and tracked.

Example two: a departmental reorganization

A regional healthcare provider restructures its operations division, merging three regional teams into one centralized function. Reporting lines change for around 120 staff, and some existing roles are eliminated.

The practitioner is an internal HR business partner assigned to the reorganization, working alongside the executive who sponsors the change. It's a common entry point into change work. Their work starts with stakeholder mapping across the three regional teams. Those teams have different histories and different levels of trust in leadership. Next, the practitioner builds the sponsor's communication plan for a change that includes role eliminations. They also design a resistance management approach for staff whose positions are being consolidated or removed.

Most of this work sits in Develop the Change Management Plan, which typically covers communication, sponsorship and resistance management, and in Execute the Change Management Plan once the announcement and transition happen. When a reorganization costs people their roles, communication and sponsorship need a different approach than in a system rollout. The work also touches Evaluate Change Impact and Organizational Readiness during the mapping phase, because understanding how each region had lived through earlier restructurings shaped the order of the plan.

This engagement ran for roughly five months, with heavy involvement during the announcement and transition. It plausibly comes to around 350 to 500 hours. In the application, describe the stakeholder mapping method you used and the specific resistance management actions you took. Leave the org chart out of it, because it shows the project's outcome, not your change management work.

Example three: a culture and behavior program

A financial services firm launches a multi-year initiative to get its departments collaborating more, after feedback that silos were slowing decisions down. There's no single go-live date and no clear technical component.

The practitioner leads the program from a transformation office and works with the leadership team of six departments. Before anything starts, they run a baseline culture assessment. Next comes a sponsorship coalition of six department heads who don't report to one common executive. Recurring engagement activities, designed to build new collaboration habits, then run over eighteen months. Up front, the practitioner also defines what a measurable shift in cross-team behavior would look like, so there's a baseline to compare against later.

This one maps to all five process groups, which is common when culture work isn't bounded by a project. The baseline assessment falls under Evaluate Change Impact and Organizational Readiness. Building a coalition of six department heads and defining measurable success belong to Formulate the Change Management Strategy. The recurring engagement activities are planned in Develop the Change Management Plan and delivered in Execute the Change Management Plan. The before-and-after comparison at eighteen months belongs to Close the Change Management Effort, and it's only possible because the baseline was set at the start.

This role took up a significant share of the practitioner's time over eighteen months. A plausible estimate falls between 800 and 1,200 hours. Open-ended programs are often harder to describe in an application than projects with a clear start and end. There's simply no go-live moment to point to. Your job is to show the discipline behind the work through what you produced: the baseline assessment, the sponsorship structure and the success metrics you defined. The Change Management Deliverables That Earn Their Keep helps you pick which of those outputs to put forward.

What the three examples have in common

None of the three practitioners had "change manager" as a formal title. None of the projects used the ACMP® Standard's vocabulary internally, and few organizations talk that way day to day. Each example still works for a CCMP® application. The practitioner could take the assessments they ran, the plans they built and the outcomes they tracked, then translate them into the Standard's process groups after the fact.

That translation is the hard part of a CCMP® application, and in our experience it's where most files struggle, rather than on the experience itself. How to Write a CCMP® Application That Gets Approved goes further into how it works. It shows how to phrase written responses so they tie explicitly to the Standard instead of describing the project in general terms. If the Standard's vocabulary still feels unfamiliar, the CCMP® exam glossary is a quick way to check that your terms mean what ACMP® means by them.

Keep the format in mind too. According to ACMP®'s guide to a successful CCMP® application, you answer three of five essay questions, in 500 words or fewer each, and only the first three responses are reviewed. The application must be written in English. ACMP® also expects your experience, taken as a whole, to cover all elements of the Standard, and experience limited to a single function, such as communications or training alone, is unlikely to qualify. And remember that these examples are partial: the application requires 4,200 hours of experience with a four-year degree, or 7,000 hours with a high school diploma, so most candidates draw on several projects.

Got real project experience but not sure how it maps, or a draft application that keeps coming back for revision? Leanova's CCMP® Application Coaching Pack (US$590) works through your actual projects with you, not hypothetical ones. It's also part of the CCMP® Coaching Bundle (US$1,195), which adds the 21-hour course, the 450-question practice exam, a 5-hour AI change management certification and the 10-hour MCMP™ course. For quick questions along the way, on-demand coaching is another option.

This article is also available in French: Trois types de projets admissibles au dossier CCMP®.

Sources, checked October 2026: ACMP® application guide, eligibility and Standard, 2nd edition: process group study aid. The three examples are illustrative composites and do not reproduce any actual candidate file. Leanova prices are current list prices and may change. ACMP®, CCMP®, MCMP™ and QEP™ are trademarks of the Association of Change Management Professionals.