Even the most experienced change managers can struggle to keep track of all the details. A successful change management process requires steady leadership, effective training and support materials, exhaustive task and resource planning and finally, change management tools for collaboration and communication.
As the saying goes, a worker is only as good as their tools. The wrong tools can lead you to chaos and confusion. The right tools can lead you and your organization to success. When you are leading organizational change, investing in the best organizational change management tools makes all the difference.
What kind of change management tools do you need?
While the needs of individual companies may differ, there are some common change control tool types you will need to drive your change initiative. These tools are an important part of any change manager’s toolkit. To effectively lead, you will need software to help you:
- Create guides and explainers
- Communicate about your project
- Plan and track your project
- Provide training and support
- Share and collaborate on documents
There are a plethora of options for change management software. It can be hard to know which tool to choose. In fact, some organizations leapfrog from one software to the next during their change management process, further complicating their plan and harming their chances for success.
How to choose the right change management tools
When considering change management tools, you must consider each potential product carefully to avoid making the wrong choice. You should ask yourself:
- What do I need this product to do?
- What are the benefits of each product?
- Is the product cost worth the investment?
- Can this tool do what I need?
- What will I need to purchase to do what this tool cannot?
- Can this product grow with my organization?
- What does this company offer for support?
- What platforms can I use with this tool?
Related: 8 Change Management Models and How To Apply Them
Here is a list of change management tools designed to make your change initiative a success:
Each of these products is scalable to meet the needs of individuals to enterprises, from free plans to enterprise-level suites. Scroll down for the complete breakdown of each of these tools.
Change management tools list (click to jump ahead):
Venngage
Best for: Visualizing change management processes
What is it: Venngage is a design solution for creating professional quality infographics. Whether you need to create manuals, processes, timelines, or change management plans, Venngage has templates to help you create high-quality graphics with ease.
Key benefits: Venngage is perfect for any of your change management communication needs with the following benefits:
- No design experience needed
- Branding kit for Business users
- More than a thousand customizable templates
- Easy drag-and-drop interface
- Publish designs on Venngage’s community page
- Seamless sharing via a public link
Pricing: Venngage offers a free plan for users that gives them unfettered access to over 1,400 templates and 3 million stock photos.
To create more infographics and have more storage available for graphics, you can upgrade to the Premium plan, which is $19/month or $16/month if you sign up for a yearly subscription. For businesses, Venngage offers a comprehensive Business plan for $49/month or $39/month if you sign up for a yearly subscription.
Viima
Best for: Small-to-medium business change strategy development
What is it: Viima is a low-cost online platform for innovation management and collaboration. With Viima, you can foster a spirit of innovation and creativity by showing employees every step of the change management process—from ideation to completion. When everybody communicates and feels comfortable sharing their ideas, change is no big deal.
Key benefits:
- Facilitate innovation and collaboration
- Powerful visualization tools
- Flexible evaluation engine
- Dashboards to show status of change effort
- Customer and client feedback analysis
Pricing: For an unlimited number of users and one dashboard, you can sign up for the free Basic account and enjoy Viima’s Basic features. For $5 per user/month you can have unlimited boards with Premium features. Want unlimited boards, unlimited users and Premium features? You will want the Unlimited Account for $1,799/month.
Wrike
Best for: Project planning and tracking
What is it: Wrike is a powerful change management tool that breaks down, siloes and improves collaboration by providing 360° visibility of the change management process. This tool is used to plan change management strategies, establish timelines and budgets, track progress towards objectives, and share your accomplishments along the way.
Key benefits: To help you organize and track projects for your organization, the paid versions of Wrike offer:
- Pre-built and purpose-driven workflow templates
- Kanban boards for Agile teams
- Gantt charts to illustrate timelines and dependencies
- Team calendars
- Time tracking
- Customizable dashboards
- Integrations with over 400 other tools
Pricing: Wrike offers free plans for simple task tracking, or you can sign up for one of their paid plans. Their Professional plan is $9.80 per user/month, and their Business plan is $24.80 per user/month. They also offer specialized enterprise plans to meet the needs of individual organizations.
Whatfix
Best for: Providing onboarding and ongoing employee training
What is it: Whatfix is an interactive digital adoption platform designed to help organizations change to new software. With this tool, change managers can easily create employee onboarding and training that walks employees through the use of the new technology.
Key benefits: Whatfix is a powerful change management application with the following benefits:
- Whatfix integrates with leading SCORM-compliant Learning Management Systems
- Walk-throughs can be embedded in multiple formats
- 24/7 Support
- Analytics to track change implementation progress
- Easy for beginners
- Coding is not required
Pricing: To get a custom quote, you must contact WhatFix directly.
Gensuite
Best for: Managing Regulatory Change and Monitoring Compliance
What is it: Gensuite is change management software that goes beyond the management of tasks and resources. This product is perfect for managing regulatory change and monitoring compliance with professional and safety standards, as well as identifying and documenting potential risks.
Key benefits: Gensuite is a great change control tool with the following key benefits:
- Self-configurable platform for analyzing risk
- Ability to create standardized change request process
- Optional integration with standards such as OSHA Process Safety Management or pre-startup safety reviews (PSSR)
- Lockout tagout and equipment tracking
- Integrated Safety Data Sheets (SDS)
Pricing: For a price quote, contact Gensuite directly.
Remedy Change Management 9
Best for: Collaborating and sharing documents
What is it: Remedy Change Management 9 is a powerful change control tool to help IT service organizations manage change through KPIs and data-driven reporting features. With this tool, you can automate and track requests and approvals, making it easy to check the status at a glance.
Key benefits: Remedy Change Management 9 facilitates change by providing:
- Capability for multi-level, gated approvals
- Data analytics to improve visibility over people, process and product
- Compliance monitoring to ensure that the organization is meeting industry standards and regulations
- Seamless request tracking
- Customizable user roles
- Deep integrations with other BMC products
- Self-service application
Pricing: For a price quote, contact BMC Software directly.
Freshservice
Best for: Collaborating and sharing documents
What is it: Freshservice is a full-suite product used by organizations and enterprises to drive and manage change. It offers the ability to track many essential elements of change management strategy, from inventory to workflows. Easily accessed via desktop computers or mobile devices, Freshservice gives change leaders all the critical information they need at a glance, wherever they may be.
Key benefits: Freshservice offers a customizable solution that is perfect for IT and non-IT organizations. The app manages change management resources with:
- Asset and inventory tracking
- Project management from planning to iteration
- Multi-level task tracking
- Automation of key tasks such as emails, responses, and conditional release actions
- Incident management
- Workflow automation
- Available on desktop computers, tablets and mobile devices
Pricing: For a price quote, contact BMC Software directly.
In summary: Invest in the right change management tools for success
Change is hard and organizational change is even harder. You must manage people, processes and workflows, all with an eye on your budget, timelines, and deliverables.
With the right change management applications, you can create high-impact presentations and guides, automate repetitive processes, track inventory and KPIs, analyze performance and risk, and maybe even make friends and influence people.
Effective communication is critical during change, so choosing the right tool for the job will save you endless headaches and help you create a seamless transition. Venngage for Execs is perfect for helping you create effective graphics to communicate everything your stakeholders need to know, from procedures to guidelines to communication plans.
No design experience? No problem. Venngage’s simple templates let you drag and drop your own graphics and content to create a professional-quality graphic.