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The configuration management plan

What is the configuration management plan? It’s a plan that defines those items that are configurable. In other words the items that require a formal change control – usually items that have been baselined, they have been locked into a point in time.

These things might be to do with your scope, your schedule, your cost, usually locked in at a point in time beause we don’t really want those to change without any formal process.

We don’t want them to change on an ad-hoc basis because obviously these will affect and impact the outcome of your project. If we’re changing the scope or the schedule or the timeline or the cost involved, those documents are usually baselined and then they require that formal change control process, and the process for controlling changes to these items.

So while it usually relates to these baselined items such as the project budget for example in our cost baseline, schedule, scope statement and work breakdown structure where we’ve broken down the scope statement into smaller activities for us to complete in order to to deliver those features or those pieces of scope.

In order to change this we’ll need to go through the configuration management process.

Like all plans in your project management plan it can be small, just a few lines of text or it can be large and detailed. It could be an entire document of its own design, depending on the size of the project, depending on the enterprise environmental factors (EEFs) of your organization. The main point is to outline which of those documents will need formal change control, and that can be completely up to you and the project sponsor. You can work together and advise which things need to go through a formal process to change. Anyone can raise a change request, and in your change management plan you note the change process, such as where that change request will go into once it’s raised. Once that change is approved after going through the approval process, we will need to realign the project scope or schedule to suit these new changes. Maybe more money or funding comes in, so you’ll have all of these steps and these steps will need to be outlined, and that’s why we have the configuration management plan.

– David McLachlan

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The Issue Log

What is the issue log? Throughout the life cycle of a project, you (as the project manager) will normally face problems or gaps, inconsistencies or even conflicts in a project. This stuff happens all the time, because your project is designed to bring about change, and so there will always be little things happening – stakeholders to manage or things people will be unhappy about. Maybe the scope needs to change, all of these little things are happening all the time in a project and they occur unexpectedly, and they require some action to bring everything back on track so that it doesn’t impact the project performance in general.

That’s when we need to raise an Issue, once these things have happened.

The issue log is a project document where all of these issues are recorded and tracked. It’s important to note that an issue and a risk are not the same. Before something happens, it’s noted as a risk, and we can note that in the risk assessment, and we’ll assign things like controls to that risk so that we can prevent the risks from happening. We’ll assign owners of those risks to look at the activities around those controls, make sure that things remain on track. Obviously not everything always goes to plan and we can’t always think of everything that will happen, so if something does happen it becomes an issue.

An issue should be noted in the issue log at that time. The issue log will help the project manager effectively track and manage those issues. We’re going to be assigning extra information to these issues so that we can effectively track those issues, and we’re ensuring that they’re investigated and resolved and closed.

Issues may happen at any time, and the issue log is updated as a result of the monitoring and controlling activities throughout the project’s life-cycle. As part of controlling issues it may result in a change request as well. If we’ve raised an issue and it’s resolved, but it is something that needs to change like the scope or the schedule, then we need to raise a change request. Maybe we’re changing one of those baselined documents, around our scope, our time or schedule, or our cost.

These are the three most most important things that will be baselined, and that might need to go through the formal change control process by raising a change request. Then you can update the issue log with all of the appropriate information once that’s resolved.

The data that we’ll put on our issues are things like the issue type, who raised that issue, the description of the issue, priority (is it high, is it low) who is assigned to the issue to manage it ongoing, the target resolution date (is in June, July or August etc), the status current status and of course the final solution to resolving that issue, which is where that change management or the change request might come into it if something needs to change.

So overall it’s a very important part of your project, because you will need to raise and manage these issues as they occur. You’ll still need to keep an eye out for risks as there are you know on the horizon as well before they turn into issues all of this is part of managing a project and keeping it on track and that is the Issue Log.

– David McLachlan

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The project management information system

The project management information system, or PMIS as you will see it referred to in the PMBOK guide, is the coherent organization of the information required for an organization to execute projects successfully. That of course is a bit of a mouthful, so what does that actually mean?

Typically it’s one or more software applications – so it’s not just one IT software application it’s a whole bunch of applications – and the process that’s associated with those software applications for collecting and using project information, most typically with the activities related to the project. It relates to who’s doing what, and when they are doing it. And that would relate to the schedule – when these activities are being done, and potentially to the scope as well. Scope is being ticked off as we’re going along on our project, and that will impact what activities are done, and the activities need to be assigned along a schedule so that we understand when these activities are going to be completed.

All of these things you can’t just rely on word of mouth for this to happen – you need to put them somewhere so that people can see them and understand what’s being done as part of your project. And that is where our PMIS comes in.

So it’s not just one IT system, it’s an entire system or approach including tools and processes. It’s the different cogs and they all intertwine and they all relate to each other, and they help move each other as part of the whole system. Your project measurement information system would include things like scheduling software tools, work authorization systems for work packages (i.e. who they’re being assigned to, who’s receiving them, are they able to work on them?), configuration management systems (i.e. the change process).

Are you changing the scope, who does that go to, does it go to the project sponsor? What’s the process there? And this IT system would facilitate that configuration management.

Document management systems, so where are all the documents being held? Information collection interfaces to other automated systems, so corporate knowledge bases, lessons learned or perhaps procurement systems that you might need if you’re hiring people or resources. Automated gathering and reporting on key performance indicators or KPIs can also be a part of this system, for example how is the project tracking?

You’ve probably used a project management information system or part of a project management information system in your life already. Some of these things will include a Kanban board, if you’ve used Atlassian JIRA or Trello, this is very simply a Kanban board where we’re moving tasks and activities across the board from “in progress” or the backlog through to “done”. And that’s how we’re tracking those activities, it’s very very simple. You might have an internal company SharePoint page, and that’s where you’re keeping all the documents for your project. Or you might have a Confluence page or something similar. The IT system itself doesn’t matter. But it does matter that you have something to hold the documents, for future projects to learn from and also for the governance around your project. This also helps the governing bodies (such as a project management office) see the activities, and that the proper governance has been checked off, that you’ve done the proper documents for procurement, for hiring people, or you’ve done the proper documents for making a change to the scope for example.

Lastly, resource calendars or an online project schedule. You might be able to see see Billy or Fiona or Helen for example, all these different people and you can see when they’re assigned to the activities and also when they are available to work on your project. That’s a very useful part of the information of your project, and that is an outline of the project management information system.

– David McLachlan

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What is a change request?

A change request is a formal proposal to modify any document, any deliverable or any baselined item (that could include your project management plan, your scope statement for example). The most common of these documents are related to the Scope, Schedule or Cost of the project. For example, are we changing the the dollars involved? Are we changing the time involved? Or are we changing the Scope that we’re delivering in our project. All of these will need a formal change request once a document or an item is baselined.

Any project stakeholder may request a change. Change requests are processed for review and disposition through the change control process, and change requests can be initiated from inside or outside the project. They can be optional or they can be legally or contractually mandated. Perhaps a legal change has happened and that requires a change that needs to go through the formal change request process, so that we’re going getting the appropriate approvals to change either the scope, the schedule or the cost. We want everyone to be across this change, we don’t want to just be changing the schedule on an ad-hoc basis otherwise people are going to get upset. We do this often times when issues, gaps or problems are found while the project work is being performed. A change request can be submitted to modify things like our project policies or procedures – maybe we need to do things in a different way – the project or product scope as we said, the cost or the budget which we’ve touched on as well. There’s the schedule or the time, if something is going to be delivered in June but all of a sudden according to our analysis it’s going to be delivered in September and maybe that’s going to affect the cost because we need more resources, then people need to know about this through the appropriate methodologies and the appropriate process, which is this change management process.

The quality of the project or the project results – if that’s going to vary significantly then perhaps we need to raise a change request as well. Maybe something simply is not possible to do, or maybe we’ve found a better way to do something and we just need to to put that into our scope so that everybody is aware. For this reason, change requests might include:

• Corrective action where we’re bringing a project back on track. For example we’re aligning the project activities to something that we’ve found.
• Preventative action – maybe we’re preventing future performance from going off-track, for example we see the schedule coming up in September instead of June, and that’s something that we want to bring back on track. Maybe we want to crash the project resources, where you add a lot of resources and money and cost and that’s going to bring it back into June so that we can get it done. Maybe we need to fast-track the schedule, which is doing everything in parallel instead of doing everything one after the other, and that will get it all done in time.
• Defect repair – as we’re going through our quality control, maybe we’re doing our test plan and testing the item and that comes up with a defect, but that actually changes the scope of the project. So it relates to scope again, we need to make a change and we need to make a formal change through our change management and change request system.

Of course we could have just general updates to our project, where maybe a customer has found that they don’t like something and we need to change that. Or maybe the situation has changed where they don’t need it until September and we can actually physically change that project schedule. All of this is completely up to you as the project manager, and usually you’ll be working with the project sponsor and the people involved who you’re delivering this project for, and the team that you’re delivering with.

The change management plan is what describes the process for these change requests. How do how do you raise a change request, for example? And what do you need to do? Who does it go to? Does it go to the project manager, then to the project sponsor? Does it need to go to a steering committee? What is the approval process of these change requests?

If we’re involving more money, and it needs to come from the project sponsor or a governing body then that needs to be approved by those people. This process can just be a few lines in your project management plan, noted as a change management process. Or it can be a complete document outlining the process. A lot of this depends a lot on the environmental factors – the enterprise environmental factors which you’ll see in almost every PMBOK guide process. That just relates to how a company works and how it operates on a day to day basis. All that will affect how you raise a change request, and what you put in your change management plan. And that is the process and the idea behind Change Requests.

– David McLachlan

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