The Configuration Management component forms is described as part of all PRINCE2 courses.
All of the products which are produced on a project are assets of the business. It is therefore important to protect these assets from unauthorised persons and unwanted changes. This is done through Configuration Management.
Configuration Management allows each product and each version of a product to be correctly identified and the status to accurately reflect the true status of a product e.g. draft, under development, approved.
Configuration Management also allows changes to products to be made easily because each version of a product can be correctly identified by a Configuration Item Record.
These Configuration Item Records can be used to identify who made a change to a product, what the latest version is, why a product was changed and when, the location of the product and its current status e.g. draft, approved, under development.
If configuration management is not performed on a project, then the project quickly dissolves into chaos as products get changed but no records are held about who made the change, why, when or what the change was.
The way in which Configuration Management is performed on a project is defined in the Configuration Management Plan which forms a part of the Project Quality Plan. This should identify who has responsibility for Configuration Management on the project. There is one specific role which PRINCE2 defines – that of Configuration Librarian.
The responsibilities of this role are to perform all of the actions necessary to perform Configuration Management on the project. This involves maintaining up to date correct records about each product and their versions, ensuring that unauthorised access to products is never allowed, issuing copies of products where necessary, and maintaining a system of logging, tracking and filing Project Issues – see Change Control chapter.
Configuration Management also allows versions of products to be base-lined. This means that a product version can be frozen at a point in time and given a label e.g. version 1. Subsequently, even though this product may undergo changes, each resulting in a different version, the base-lined version can always be recreated.
There may be times when someone needs to know the particular status or version of a product. This can be obtained by producing a Product Status Account which is a report generated from the Configuration Item Records.
It is always possible that the actual status of a product becomes different from the status stored in Configuration Management. This usually occurs because the agreed procedures for performing Configuration Management are not followed. It is usually all too easy for project team members to try to take shortcuts and therefore fail to update the Configuration Item Records correctly. This can quickly lead to chaos on a project with people making changes to products which have incorrect status.
The way to avoid this situation is to perform periodic configuration audits, usually at the end of each stage which compares the actual products against the records held in Configuration Management. Whatever discrepancies exist must be rectified so that the records held in Configuration Management accurately reflect the true status of products.
This article was taken from the booklet Concise PRINCE2™ (PRINCE2 ™ is a Trade Mark of the Office of Government Commerce) which was offered to students as part of the PRINCE2 training course (version 2005) by Knowledge Train. This booklet has been based on OGC (PRINCE2™) material. Reproduced under licence from OGC.
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