Change Management Software 2077



  • Hello all,
    I am a IT Controls Analyst for a company that currently has a very manual approach to change management. They still use paper forms for change tickets and have to manually complete and forward these things around for approvals and it’s creating alot of unnecessary control failures.
    I’m trying to champion a more automated approach and have been researching the various solutions, but thought what better place to get some independent feedback than a SOX forum.
    Can anyone recommend a good solution to change management that is relatively easy to maintain and has good workflow capabilities built in? I’m looking for a solution that eliminates paper forms (obviously) and allows the whole process to be automated as much as possible. In my days at EY I came across many products like Remedy, Movaris, Service Desk, etc… but I only saw the finished product and never had any hands-on interaction with the software.
    The ideal solution would allow a user to enter a request online. The request is automatically routed to a queue for the approval committee. Once the approval committee blesses the request they can route it to the appropriate developer/admin for resolution. If UAT is required, the developer completes the request and the notification is routed to the testers who will test the fix and approve the change form online. Finally, the people responsible for implementing the change into production receive the notification with all necessary approvals and make the change.



  • Hi and welcome to the forums 🙂
    Yes, automation in the Change Control process is indeed beneficial, as communications and control are two desirable elements to strive for.
    At work, we use BMC’s Service Desk and it’s a comprehensive tool for incident handling. I’ve also had training and a lot of experience with Atlassian’s JIRA (atlassian.com - an Australian software vendor), which I thought had a great design more oriented toward Change Management needs. I’ve also used Endevor on the Mainframe and JIRA is one of my favorites so far.
    As we use Lotus Notes, even a simple home-grown approach is far better than a paper based system. You can create groups of VIPs (folks that need to know). Then whenever system changes occur, folks in the workflow can notify or route items via email rather than paper – improving the effectiveness of communications and actions.
    Benefits of an email based system
    – Electronic record
    – Less subject to distorting history or evidence than paper
    – Can be backed up and retained as part of history
    – Provides improved communications (quicker and more complete to everyone)
    … the list goes on …



  • To add to Harry’s suggestions;
    There are tools like Remedy, and UNICENTER from CA are pretty useful for managing changes. These can provide a high degree of automation and tracking. However, i have my own doubts on their capability to imbibe a workflow for change approvals.
    Cheers



  • To further add to Harry’s suggestions:
    Most (if not all) SOX compliance software packages include change management tools. We purchased a software package from Paisley earlier this year that helps us to organize our team’s efforts, track our progress relative to our timeline, ensure that our risks are sufficiently mitigated, and maintain a record of all changes (with specificity).



  • Thanks guys for the input. I’m going to start researching some of your recommendations now…



  • CM is a great opportunity to automate (assuming you have enough funds). HEAT is my favorite system, Remedy is good too. Good things about HEAT that it validates against your network ID for signoffs. Thus is hard to falsify signoffs or do them after the fact. Makes the test a breeze so you can move on, to more exciting stuff 😉



  • We are using Service-now.com as our itil service desk. Change management is pretty good. We passed our year-1 audit in '06 with them. It’s a SaaS (software as a service) company, but that is our business model as well.


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