Roadmap: How to Adopt the Configuration Management Practice
This roadmap describes how to adopt the Configuration Management Practice
Main Description

Getting Started

To get started with adopting this practice, identify if your organization already has a defined configuration management process that your follow and decide on whether to follow the organization process (as is) or to adapt the process to your project needs.

Make your team fully understand about configuration management and need for configuration management in the project.

The Configuration Manager should establish configuration management policies and conduct a gap analysis between current policies and the newly proposed ones. Policies may include business rules, identification and naming procedures for configuration items, baselining configuration items. Policies also determine how often a configuration audit is required and designate where configuration items must be stored as well as what actions must be performed when there is a change to configuration items. The identified policies should be documented in the configuration management plan that helps the team to understand and follows the policies.

Develop configuration plan to make sure the entire team understands about the approach for configuration management and performs the CM activities according to the established policies. See Develop Configuration Management (CM) Plan .The plan includes the configuration identification, configuration control, configuration status accounting, configuration audits and reviews, configuration Management schedules and resources.

Create an environment where the configuration items can be stored, developed and also ensure that the access is restricted to authorized individuals. This includes setting up the hardware environment and establishing the development environment. It is important that software configuration management tools are configured properly, so that the established policies and procedures are implemented and followed accordingly.

Also part of creating configuration environment is to ensure that each team member should have an own workspace which allows them to individually develop and make changes to configuration items and then later make them visible to the team. This includes ensuring the project member can access to any required version of configuration item which they need.

See Set Up Configuration Management (CM) Environment.

You need to establish a standard procedure to make changes to configuration items and also ensure they are orderly integrated with other changes made by the team members. See Change and Deliver Configuration Items.

It is required to promote the baselines as part of the adoption.See Integrate System.

It is important to store and recover archive versions of configuration items.

Common Pitfalls

  • Lack of communication - The policies should be placed at location where it is easily accessible and location should be effectively communicated to everyone.
  • Manual Implementation - Tools can be used to avoid problems caused by manual implementation such as human errors, high cost of manual labor etc. .
  • Lack of understanding of SCM knowledge - Everyone in the team should be have knowledge about software configuration management and take proper training needed to avoid confusion, inability to understand complex topics.