What is Configuration Management?

0:00 when we refer to the configuration of a system we're referring to the technical description of that system and how its component parts interconnect so what is configuration management [Music] in our project management glossary be on the inside decode the jargon of project management we define configuration management as defining controlling releasing changing documenting and reporting the configuration of items in a

0:48 system we can think of a system as either a technology solution that we are implementing within our project or the system could be the project itself in the latter case where configuration management refers to the project it'll concern itself with things like the project scope and scope management quality and quality management and crucially change control the management of changes to the scope and therefore to the plan of our project itself however most often when we talk about

1:35 configuration management we're concerned with the configuration of the system or the product that we are either developing or adapting within our project and that's what i'm going to concentrate on when i describe what configuration management is in this video as a result configuration management is an important devops process devops is a set of processes that combines software development and i t operations the purpose of configuration management is to ensure that we can properly track the configuration of a system through its whole life cycle

2:21 from creation through to retirement without proper configuration management therefore we cannot properly build test install accept operate maintain or support the system nor indeed properly decommission it as a result a big part of configuration management is therefore tracking changes and we need therefore to collect a lot of data data that includes things like date version number status product owner features components connections

3:08 and interfaces and relationships with other products it is beyond the scope of this video and frankly of my competence to examine the methodologies that we use for configuration management however i will list the five principal components first is configuration management planning pulling together a plan for how we are going to manage the configuration of the system that we're implementing second is configuration identification this is about creating and maintaining the baseline of the configuration against which we are going to monitor

3:53 and document the changes that we make third is configuration control this is very like change control within the main body of the project management body of knowledge that is to say it is about evaluating and then deciding whether to accept or reject changes to the configuration of the system fourth is configuration status accounting sounds complicated but largely this is about documenting and reporting the changes to the configuration of the system and finally we have configuration verification and audit this is the independent or sometimes

4:40 quasi-independent review of processes artifacts and compliance within your configuration management system as you might expect there is a huge variety of software tools available to support configuration management for us as project managers the important thing is to ensure that our project plans contain where necessary reference to the configuration management plan or indeed incorporated directly i tend to think of configuration management as part of my scope management process [Music]

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