With a solid configuration management plan, you can effortlessly define, document, control, instruct, implement, and manage changes to various components of your project.
It’s needed for your systems and governance engineering processes to control and track IT services and resources across your organization.
The baseline of a configuration management plan is to be mindful of all the items and document their functional interdependencies and capabilities.
And to deliver the best IT services, you need to follow some IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) guidelines.
An ITIL framework can cover various IT services like backups, cloud services, network security, managed print services, help desk support, IT consulting, and more. It offers a structured and systematic approach to managing risk, establishing cost-effective practices, and strengthening customer relations.
Let’s discuss the configuration management plan, its benefits, objectives, components, and best practices.
Configuration management involves maintaining the consistency of a product’s functionality, performance, and physical attributes with the help of its design, operational information, and requirements throughout its lifecycle.
The configuration management process involves five simple steps:
Whether you are a small business, a growing company, or an enterprise, starting a project requires you to define some specific procedures for your project. By breaking down each process, you can easily plan for every step.
That is where a configuration management plan is helpful to control, document, define, manage, and audit changes to each component of your project. It involves procedures and requirements that are essential for your configuration management activities. It also allows you to control and manage your project according to the client’s requirements.
Proper configuration planning defines the items of your project which are configurable and need some formal changes. These items could be color, size, shape, weight, and materials. Particular specifications according to their functions dictate the capability of every product and allow you to achieve a specific outcome.
Example: Let’s take a car as an example. Its physical specs are color, number of doors (four-door or two-door), etc., and functional specifications are the ability to reach 60 mph in 5 seconds, automatic car lock, etc.
Configuration management involves five steps – planning, identification, control, status accounting, and audit. This system engineering process is widely used by military organizations to control and manage changes throughout the lifecycle of complex systems, including military vehicles, information systems, and weapon systems.
Implementing a configuration management plan in your business acts as an umbrella for your project. It manages and traces the emerging product or software along with its versions. It also controls the identified configuration of the software, tools, and hardware throughout the lifecycle.
You must go with the technology flow to stand in the market and deter unwanted situations and risks that can destroy your assets. The main objectives behind a configuration management plan are:
Configuration management requires a mechanism to store and operate data. ITIL introduced the new concept of the configuration management system (CMS) to replace the configuration management database (CMDB).
The main reason behind it is that CMDB gives the concept of a single monolithic repository, whereas CMS offers a conceptualized system of CMDB. CMDBs act together to support governance process needs.
Thus, the configuration management process, along with its repository, CMS or CMDB, faces challenges in terms of data contradicting and overlapping. To overcome the challenges, a configuration management plan was introduced that provides a way to reconcile and merge CIs to present only a single source of truth.
A configuration management plan serves four key purposes – service delivery, security, compliance, and consistency. Think of a situation where a traditional data center has dozens of network switches, physical servers, storage devices, etc. It is crucial to understand the environment in order to ensure every application, OS, and device is configured in an acceptable way.
This may sound problematic and complex, but a configuration management plan is necessary to provide more consistency to your IT environment. So, whenever a device or application requires a replacement or service, a strong plan provides a baseline for the issue, and sooner the result will be on the screen.
Configuration management plans play a vital role in our technology-based world. It has many benefits in multiple sectors, such as:
IT services and infrastructure services should always have a pre-planned structure for every item involved in the process so that it will be easy for a project manager or stakeholder to identify, document, and audit the whole process. They should also look for areas to improve and develop a better plan.
A configuration management plan includes:
Thus, the configuration manager and tool administrator need to follow these steps for the whole planning process:
The configuration management plan can help everyone in a project understand the configurations of each item that is required for the project. As a result, project managers can create strategies for their team to achieve deliverables to complete projects.
This helps stakeholders as well so that they can track the progress and deliverables of the project. For such strategies, a manager should follow four stages to create and implement a configuration plan.
First, you need to identify the configurable items involved in your project. It helps in developing a unique method for each individual CI. With this component, you will know which item is placed under the management process, the components of the product, the structure of the components, and the versions of the items.
Here, you will control the activity of managing the product or its deliverables and its related documentation throughout your project lifecycle. With the second stage, you will understand the controllable items, the changes that can be controlled, and who is handling the changes.
This stage involves recording and reporting the changes to the items. You will get to know the status, changes that have been made, changes’ time and location, and affected components.
The last stage is essential to verify the correctness of the product, components, and configurations applied to ensure conformance according to the requirements. This also verifies whether the status accounting information is correct or not. Apart from ensuring the correctness of configuration items, it helps:
Configuration management is essential to IT and infrastructure services. Let’s see some of the areas where configuration management plays a crucial role.
SCM is a way for many organizations to trace modifications to the source code repository. Before the introduction of source code management, developers were facing difficulties in saving each other’s work unknowingly.
Proper planning prevents loss of overwork, overwriting, and so on. It can also be used to enhance insight and visibility within an organization.
Build engineering often shows challenges like lack of reproducibility, added technical debt, security concerns, and dependencies. To overcome such challenges, you need a consistent build environment that includes a systematic, unified, and standardized approach to creating a regular workflow.
Multiple developers on the same project team mean multiple brainstorming and divergent results. Organizations configure the environment to reduce inconsistencies asking developers to limit themselves according to the approved design elements, such as change control, release engineering, and deployments.
A configuration management database (CMDB) is a central repository of all the data that acts as a data warehouse. It stores information about the IT environment. Moreover, it is an essential database for configuration management. What CMDB exactly does is keep the data of configurable items in a single place.
Here, configuration items could mean a server, a virtual machine, an application, a container, a logical construct like a portfolio, and a router. For a fully functional CMDB, accuracy and constant updating are necessary.
It helps IT teams in various ways, starting from eliminating outages and reducing time to avoiding security fines and maintaining reporting as well as tracking. It further helps technology managers to plan the whole configuration management process with high-level enterprise architecture and asset management.
Similarly, configuration audits help track the changes that are actually made against the authorized product. This ensures configuration items meet functional requirements and come under industry standards, governmental laws, and company-specific policies.
The configuration management plan undertakes a configuration audit strategy to ensure the effectiveness and correctness of the configuration management. It also determines the actions and operational activities related to configuration items.
To ensure your organization’s assets are available all the time and everything works perfectly, you must configure each item by implementing these best practices:
An effective configuration management plan is crucial. It needs adequate resources, a highly configured desktop, and other requirements. So, if you want all your systems to behave optimally and access resources on the go, ensure to keep your configurations at their best version.
You can improve the approach by creating standards, maintaining documentation, configuration integrity checks, upgrading procedures, controlling versions, and more. This results in enhanced productivity, greater resilience, happier employees, and a structured database.
