What is change management software, and how does it help you deal with change, increase productivity, and foster a culture of adaptation for lasting success? How to choose the one that is best for your needs? Below we answer these questions and present the 15 best change management tools currently available on the market, which you can check out today!
What Is Change Management in ITIL?
Change Management vs. Project Management
Change Management vs. Configuration Management
How Does ITIL Change Management Software Work?
Benefits of Implementing a Change Management Tool In the Company
15 of the Best Change Management Tools
1. SolarWinds Service Desk (Free Trial)
2. SolarWinds Web Help Desk (Free Trial)
9. ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus
12. CA Service Management (Broadcom)
13. HP Service Manager (Now Micro Focus Service Manager)
Conclusion: SolarWinds Service Desk Leads the Pack
What Is Change Management in ITIL?
In the fast-growing world of technology, things are always changing at a rapid pace. Businesses must continually adapt to improve and stay competitive in the market. However, adopting changes in current software might be risky or harmful if proper measures aren’t taken. That’s where ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) and ITSM (Information Technology Service Management) come in handy. They provide useful measures for managing and adapting to market changes effectively. One crucial part of this process is called change management, a collective term for preparing, supporting, and helping individuals, teams, and organizations make organizational change.
Let’s look at some myths and confusion that have arisen between change management, project management, and configuration management, because all of these terms feel the same but are quite different.
Change Management vs. Project Management
- Focus and Scope: Change management handles the people’s side of changes and ensures everyone can adapt to new processes seamlessly. Meanwhile, project management concentrates on specific project requirements, including planning and executing projects against defined constraints like time and resources.
- Timeframe: Change management is concerned with changes’ long-term adoption and sustainability. Meanwhile, project management has a specific start and end date which requires achieving targets within a defined timeframe.
- Approach to Risk: Change management aims to reduce the risks associated with not accepting changes effectively, which could hinder project success. Project management focuses on reducing the risks that come with deadlines, budgeting, and use of resources.
Change Management vs. Configuration Management
- Change management is concerned with managing all processes surrounding change. In contrast, configuration management focuses on maintaining a record of an organization’s IT assets, relationships, dependencies, and configurations.
- Change management covers the software cycle from planning to evaluation. Configuration management encompasses tracking the lifespan of IT assets and their configurations. During this process, we rely on CMDB, i.e., configuration management database.
How Does ITIL Change Management Software Work?
Change management software operates as a centralized platform, streamlining the entire process of handling change requests in IT. On a centralized platform, users can submit change requests through software. As they raise concerns, certain change requests undergo evaluation where the impact and benefits of a change are considered. The platform routes the request to the appropriate stakeholders at the approval stage. Then, detailed plans are created for approved changes, including resource allocation and scheduling processes.
After change implementation planning and resource allocation, the team starts executing the changes while ensuring adherence to requirements and minimizing disruptions. As something is changed, an automatic notification is sent to all stakeholders. If the change is successfully implemented and deployed, then comes preserving all the compliance and references related to the change to troubleshoot future issues. After this, all the changes are reviewed and evaluated for success and improvement. And this is how ITIL change management software solutions can integrate with other ITSM tools for seamless IT service management.
Benefits of Implementing a Change Management Tool In the Company
Implementing a change management system in your organization has a wide range of benefits. It can help manage and maintain the work and progress of the software development life cycle, issue fixes in existing features, and direct updates about upcoming changes easily and effectively. What else can change management systems provide?
Improved Communication and Collaboration
Change management tools facilitate clear communication among teams in the change process. They help resolve bugs or customer issues faster with effective communication and updates from each team member.
Accelerated Change Adoption
The structured workflow of any project can help facilitate faster approvals of required changes and smoother execution of the program. It can also help to adopt any new process or technology.
Reduce Risk and Disruptions
The change management team is an internal team and stakeholder with the access and knowledge to help identify potential risks, share updates with appropriate users, and manage any disruptions to the organization.
Consistency and Standardization
Implementing change management tools promotes consistent change processes across an organization. Standardization also leads to fewer errors, hence improving predictability.
Efficient Resource Allocation
Streamlining the processes also helps to optimize resource allocation. It ensures that the required assets and access are available to the right people at the appropriate time.
Enhanced Accountability
Change management tools provide a transparent record of all the change activities. That makes it easier to track responsibilities and individual roles in the change process, as well as the changes, their impact, and the reasoning behind decisions. It helps to boost ownership and commitment among the team members.
Increased Customer Satisfaction
Managing changes using tools and logging for each decision leads to improved service delivery and fewer disruptions to customers. Therefore, customer trust and satisfaction levels rise and positively impact the organization.
15 of the Best Change Management Tools
Now, let’s walk through the best change management tools available and commonly used by organizations, as well as some of their key features. This will help you to pick tools according to the features your customers or software demands.
1. SolarWinds Service Desk (Free Trial)
© 2023 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved.
SolarWinds Service Desk is a powerful cloud-based IT service management solution that’s designed to simplify change management processes. It includes various functionality to handle change requests effectively. With its user-friendly interface and robust automation, it’s an easy choice for a lot of businesses.
- Automated Workflows: It allows for automated workflows to speed up change approvals, and everything is automated, including ticket distribution and escalations.
- Impact Assessment: You can evaluate potential changes in IT assets and services to make better decisions.
- Reports and Analytics: It has a feature where you can generate real-time reports and analytics visualizations to analyze the performance of changes and the current flow of a project.
- Change Calendar: It maintains a visual calendar of schedule changes to avoid conflicts.
- Allows for easy integration with ITSM tools.
SolarWinds offers a 30-day free trial. You can find out more on their official website.
2. SolarWinds Web Help Desk (Free Trial)
© 2023 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved.
Web Help Desk is a user-friendly and cost-effective IT service management tool that provides change management capabilities for almost all types of businesses. Due to its ease of use, simple UI, and quick setup, it stands out from other service management tools. It ensures businesses can track and respond to change requests in an efficient way. It’s a great choice for small to medium-sized companies who are seeking an affordable yet robust change management application.
- SLA Management: It offers a powerful SLA (service level agreement) service to set specific agreements for certain change requests to meet customer expectations.
- Knowledge Base Integrations: It also integrates with the knowledge base, allowing users to access relevant information and solutions during a change process.
- Allows customized change approval workflows.
- Offers customizable dashboards and reporting capabilities to monitor trends and performance.
You can try out SolarWinds Web Help Desk during the 14-day free trial.
3. Jira Service Management
Copyright © 2023 Atlassian
Jira is powered by Atlassian. It offers some of the best user experience, automation, and integration capabilities to enhance change processes. It’s free to use for up to three agents. With Jira, teams get tools that are necessary to reduce risks and present the IT operations team with richer context.
- Impact Analysis: You can conduct an impact assessment to know which changes affect which parts of services.
- Integration with Development Tools: Easy coordination and collaboration between development and IT teams.
- Good deployment tracking.
- Useful asset management.
Atlassian Jira offers a 7-day free trial.
4. ServiceNow
©️ 2023 ServiceNow. All rights reserved.
ServiceNow is a cloud-based platform that ranked top in Gartner Magic Quadrant for IT service management for seven consecutive years. It provides a centralized and scalable platform to handle change requests and automated processes, and it ensures smooth change implementations. It provides an end-to-end solution to control the life cycle of change initiatives. So it first gathers requests, evaluates their impact on IT infrastructure, plans implementation, and then conducts post-implementation reviews.
- Change Collision Detection: With its advanced algorithms, it can detect and prevent collisions between changes to ensure a conflict-free change environment. Multiple customers often raise the same issue in different ways or create different tickets linked to similar changes, so ServiceNow helps prevent that automatically.
- Change Portfolio Management: It allows for managing change requests as a portfolio, which helps facilitate better resource allocation and prioritization of changes.
- Built-in integrations with other applications of ServiceNow.
- Integration with DevOps pipeline to streamline change implementation.
ServiceNow offers a free trial period to experience its capabilities first-hand.
5. FreshService
© 2023 Freshworks Inc. All Rights Reserved
FreshService is a modern IT asset management system that provides robust change management capabilities. It empowers organizations with reporting, asset management, release management, and change management. The biggest advantage to using this tool is that it takes care of multiple verticals and integrations with its parent platform, FreshDesk, and its sales platform, FreshSales.
- Rollback Management: You can plan, track performance, and roll back changes from one place.
- Visual Change Workflow Designer: It allows users to customize change workflows intuitively.
- Built-in integration with other applications of FreshDesk.
Freshservice provides a 21-day free trial period.
6. Wrike
©2006-2023 Wrike, Inc. All rights reserved. Patented.
Wrike is a versatile and collaborative platform designed to help teamss streamline work processes, manage tasks, and collaborate effectively. Primarily, this tool is known for project management functionalities, providing all the functionalities to easily manage project changes. It also provides customized software for some industries where the team works on custom and pre-configured templates.
- Customizable Change Template: It offers customizable templates to fit specific project requirements with defined standards.
- Standard communication and easy collaboration like @mentions allow collaborators to be directly looped into conversations.
- Provides visual representation of goals and tasks.
7. SysAid
Copyright © 2023 SysAid. All Rights Reserved.
It’s an IT service management platform that provides service desk as well as help desk features. For all service desk procedures it offers automation. Its user-friendly UI and integrated ITSM modules make it a great choice for businesses seeking an all-in-one solution for managing IT changes.
- Change Gantt Charts: It offers a visual Gantt chart view of change requests for better planning and resource allocation.
- Change Workflow Builder: It allows organizations to create tailored change processes that align with specific needs.
- Excellent incident management and ticketing management.
SysAid is currently offering a 30-day free trial on its website.
8. Ivanti Service Manager
Copyright © 2023 Ivanti. All rights reserved.
Ivanti is an ITSM software with robust features, scalability, and flexibility in an integrated platform. It provides an excellent starting point for an implementation that can save time and reduce cost. It’s a preferred choice for companies seeking comprehensive solutions to optimize their IT service delivery and change management processes.
- Impact-Based Change Risk Management: It helps organizations prioritize and focus on critical and high-risk changes.
- Mobile Change Management: It offers mobile access to change management features, empowering users to handle change requests on the go.
- Includes a change calendar and scheduling.
9. ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus
© 2023 Zoho Corporation Pvt. Ltd. All rights reserved.
This tool serves as one solution for streamlining IT operations, enhancing service delivery, and managing changes efficiently. It manages all details related to the shift from a single location. It also analyzes the level of risk in change management.
- Change Approval Board (CAB) Automation: It automates CAB meetings and approvals to expedite the change approval process.
- Change Calendar and Collision Detection: Provides a centralized platform to detect potential conflicts.
- Includes change templates and workflows.
- Receives notifications based on stage and status change.
- Sends recommendations to CAB members for approval.
10. IBM Control Desk
© Copyright IBM Corporation 1994, 2023.
It’s a service management solution that helps manage a range of IT processes, assets, and services. It leverages the ITIL to help in managing the IT landscape, which is becoming more complex, distributed, and diverse.
- It has tools for easily reporting problems and requesting services.
- Provides policy-based automation of job plans, task assignments, and notifications.
- Includes advance reports and analytics tools that provide insight into your environment and help manage change more efficiently.
If you go to the IBM website, you can find they offer a 30-day free trial to give it a try.
11. TopDesk
© 2023 TOPdesk. All rights reserved.
TopDesk is user-friendly and versatile IT service management software that enables teams to plan a complete workflow. You can even automate the workflow, clear schedules of change, monitor planning with ease, and create a to-do list of tasks.
- Handy to-do list creation of workflow management tasks and can run them smoothly.
- Immediate access to all relevant information.
- Change calendar and scheduling.
12. CA Service Management (Broadcom)
Copyright © 2005-2023 Broadcom. All Rights Reserved.
The tool is now owned by Broadcom and is a comprehensive IT service management solution that includes robust change management capabilities. It’s designed to streamline IT operations and enhance service delivery, CA Service Management provides organizations with a powerful platform to effectively manage changes.
- Change request life cycle management.
- Change approval workflow management automation.
- Change collaboration and communication.
13. HP Service Manager (Now Micro Focus Service Manager)
© 2023 Open Text
The Micro Focus Service Manager is a powerful IT service management solution that encompasses comprehensive change management capabilities. With a strong heritage and reputation in the ITSM industry, the Micro Focus Service Manager is trusted to provide reliable and scalable tools to optimize IT change processes.
- Change approval and workflow automation.
- Change calendar and scheduling.
- Change collaboration.
14. Whatfix
© 2023 Whatfix.
Whatfix is an interactive digital adoption platform that fills a significant gap in IT service management software by providing employee onboarding support and change management training. It provides complete guidance to use its UI and navigate easily on any newly introduced application. It also allows tracking the progress of work and gathering feedback from the team.
- Step-by-step guidance on the key processes.
- Easy to create interactive walkthroughs.
- Customizable analytics dashboard.
- Easy integration with the help desk and LMS.
15. Axios Systems Assyst
© 2023 IFS assyst
Assyst by Axios Systems is an IT service management tool that offers a service catalog, self service, collaboration, and asset management within its suite. Its interface makes use of drag-and-drop tools and allows users to design an interface and functions for their processes.
- Easy Configuration Management Database (CMDB) integration to keep all records up-to-date.
- Change request asset lifecycle management.
- Change impact assessment.
- Change approval workflow automation.
Conclusion: SolarWinds Service Desk Leads the Pack
Picking the right change management tool is crucial for success and to continue being competitive in the market. While exploring the 15 best change management software tools, one tool has emerged as a market leader, considering factors like business size, cost, ease of use, setup, scalability, and availability – SolarWinds Service Desk.
SolarWinds Service Desk is user-friendly, with robust automation capabilities and seamless collaboration tools that make it stand out among other tools. With Service Desk, organizations can confidently manage change requests and ensure successful change implementation across the board. Moreover, SolarWinds is dedicated to creating innovative services, setting it apart from the competition. SolarWinds Service Desk stands out as the go-to choice for businesses looking for an integrated, scalable, and reliable change management system.
This post was written by Gourav Bais. Gourav is an applied machine learning engineer skilled in computer vision/deep learning pipeline development, creating machine learning models, retraining systems, and transforming data science prototypes to production-grade solutions.