– See All Project Management Key Concepts –
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