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How is Ana-Maria Thijssen's team preparing to scale change communications across 30 locations in the next wave of their SAP programme?
The next wave of Thijssen's SAP transformation programme jumps from 3 locations to 30 — spanning Europe and America. To handle that scale, her team is building a structured repository of training materials and templates so local change coordinators can onboard and operate independently, without relying on the central team for every task. The goal is for everyone — global and local — to be proactive, staying several weeks ahead of the programme timeline at all times.
From 3 locations to 30 — and why that changes everything about how you prepare
When a programme grows tenfold in geographic scope, you can no longer run communications the same way. In earlier waves, Thijssen's central team could manage closely. With 30 locations across two continents, that hands-on model breaks down fast.
The response is structural: rather than asking local teams to improvise or wait for instructions, the central team is creating a single, consistent repository — a shared library of materials, templates, and narrative frameworks that any local change coordinator can pick up and use on day one. As Thijssen explains in Unprompted: Real AI in IC, the priority is making sure everyone already knows where to find what they need before they need it.
This is a deliberate shift from reactive to proactive operations. Staying several weeks ahead of the programme timeline is not aspirational — it is the stated operating standard for both the central global team and every local coordinator in the next wave.
A consistent narrative as the anchor — so no location drifts off-message
At 30 locations, message drift is a genuine risk. If each local team interprets the SAP change story differently, the overall programme narrative fractures — and with 6,000 users ultimately impacted, that fragmentation has real consequences for adoption.
Thijssen's repository approach directly addresses this. By giving every local coordinator access to the same materials and the same core narrative, the central team preserves consistency without needing to be present everywhere. The framework does the standardisation work, and local coordinators handle the implementation. This is a point explored in depth in this episode of Unprompted.
It also reflects the broader challenge Thijssen navigated personally: she joined the programme roughly 18 months after it launched, with no formal induction and no handover. She knows first-hand what it costs to onboard without a proper framework. Building one for local coordinators is, in part, the solution she wished had existed for her own arrival.
"AI became my virtual colleague. It's not a person that does my job. It's more like an entity that helps me bounce ideas and not feel so alone."
Ana-Maria Thijssen — Change Communications Lead, OCM/CMO team, large global corporation running an SAP IT transformation programme.
Thijssen is the sole communications professional embedded within her organisation's Organizational Change Management team. She joined the programme approximately a year and a half after it had already started — with no formal induction — and has since had to build her working knowledge from scratch, leaning on colleagues who have been involved since January 2015 and, increasingly, on AI tools to fill the gaps. She operates across a multi-wave, multi-continent programme that will ultimately reach 6,000 users. Her approach to AI — not as a replacement for human judgement, but as a thinking partner — runs throughout her conversation with Carly and Simon on Unprompted: Real AI in IC.
An OCM team manages the human side of large-scale organisational transformations — ensuring that employees understand, accept, and adopt new systems or ways of working. In the context of a global SAP rollout, the OCM team designs and delivers the communications, training, and stakeholder engagement that sit alongside the technical implementation. Thijssen's role as the sole communications professional within such a team makes her responsible for translating complex programme milestones into clear, consistent messaging for thousands of employees worldwide — a challenge she discusses openly in this episode of Unprompted.
See also
What are the risks of relying on AI-generated references in change communications work, and how can practitioners mitigate them?
Ana-Maria Thijssen warns that AI frequently produces dead links, fabricated references, or citations that lead only to blog posts reflecting one person's opinion rather than verified research. Practitioners must manually verify every reference AI provides before using it in any official communications.
What approach does Ana-Maria Thijssen recommend for prompting AI to find reliable external research and case studies?
Thijssen insists on always asking AI to provide references alongside every idea it generates — not in a single list at the end, but paired with each point — so that sources can be checked in real time and any fabricated citations caught immediately.
How did Ana-Maria Thijssen use Microsoft Copilot to develop audience personas for a global change communications programme?
Thijssen's team fed documents, org charts, communication models, and examples into Microsoft Copilot and asked it to identify the most distinct personas across the organisation, using the outputs as a starting framework that human expertise then refined and validated.
Key takeaways
- The next SAP wave covers 30 locations across Europe and America — a tenfold increase from the 3 locations managed in earlier waves.
- A centralised repository of templates and training materials is the core mechanism for enabling local change coordinators to operate independently at that scale.
- Consistency of narrative — ensuring every location works from the same messaging framework — is treated as a prerequisite for programme-wide adoption.
- Both central and local teams are expected to stay several weeks ahead of the programme timeline, making proactive preparation the standard rather than the exception.
Hear Ana-Maria Thijssen explain this in her own words.
The full conversation is available on Listenly — including how she uses AI to stay ahead on a programme of this scale.