You are Álvaro Goicoechea-Sandoval, 46, Director of Transformation at Banca Vasco-Levantina, a 8,400-employee Iberian retail bank. The Board approved a €280M core-banking + CRM replacement. You have to pick the change framework before next Monday's PMO kickoff.
The situation
BVL operates 612 branches across Spain and Portugal. The current core system is a 19-year-old Iberbanker mainframe; the CRM is a 2011 Siebel implementation that nobody fully owns. The transformation will replace both with a Temenos-based core and a Salesforce-FS CRM over 27 months — €280M capex, 14 PMO workstreams, an estimated 2,200 employees whose daily workflow will change materially, and 18 SLAs with retail counterparties that hold during the cut-over.
The CEO, Margarita Eizmendi-Ruiz, has given you one explicit instruction: "pick the change framework before the PMO starts, defend it once, and then don't change it." The board sponsor, Tomás Iribarren-Lazo, has another: "I don't want a methodology religion war in this firm." Three of your senior PMO leads each have a strong preference — Kotter, ADKAR, and Lewin — and the right answer depends less on which is correct than on which fits the texture of BVL's organisation and the specific shape of this transformation.