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It offers a structured and systematic approach to managing risk, establishing cost-effective practices, and strengthening customer relations.
Lets discuss the configuration management plan, its benefits, objectives, components, and best practices.
What is Configuration Management?
The configuration management process involves five simple steps:
What do you mean by Configuration Management Plan?
By breaking down each process, you could easily plan for every step.
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 clients 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.
Example: Lets take a car as an example.
Configuration management involves five steps planning, identification, control, status accounting, and audit.
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.
The main objectives behind a configuration management plan are:
Why is a Configuration Management Plan necessary?
Configuration management requires a mechanism to store and operate data.
CMDBs act together to support governance process needs.
A configuration management plan serves four key purposes service delivery, security, compliance, and consistency.
Configuration management plans play a vital role in our technology-based world.
They should also look for areas to improve and develop a better plan.
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’re gonna wanna identify the configurable items involved in your project.
It helps in developing a unique method for each individual CI.
This stage involves recording and reporting the changes to the items.
This also verifies whether the status accounting information is correct or not.
Lets 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 others 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.
Multiple developers on the same project team mean multiple brainstorming and divergent results.
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.
For a fully functional CMDB, accuracy and constant updating are necessary.
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.
It needs adequate resources, a highly configured desktop, and other requirements.
This results inenhanced productivity, greater resilience, happier employees, and a structured database.
