Configuration Management: Essential Skill For An Organized Project

During the project life cycle, there are several plans to be created. The project management plan includes project management processes and integrates what is to be done during every project management knowledge area. Unlike the project management plan, the management plans are unique to the project and they belong to particular knowledge areas. This plan is one of these plans. In this article, we are going to discuss the role of this plan. Also, we are going to explain how the configuration management system works in favor of a strong project management.

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In PMP Training, the management plans plan play an important role. If you are preparing for the PMP Certification Exam, you should have a strong knowledge of all the management plans.

What is It?

It defines how you will manage changes to deliverables and the resulting documentation, including which organizational tools you will use.

You may find yourself asking ‘What changes?’. Yes, during the planning process everything was thoroughly planned, also the requirements management plan was sealed. But changes are normal in complex works, such as projects. So there is the change management plan, which has the objective of controlling these changes. And, according to the PMP project management course, Configuration management aims to control the versions of different project management plans. Let’s explain this a little bit more detailed.

Naturally, in each change that will be made to the management plans, a new version must be taken. For instance, the first version of the scope management plan might be 1.0 and when a new update comes, it might be versioned as 1.1 and if a major update comes, it might be versioned as 2.0.

At a certain point through the project, there will be several releases of each management plan and these will belong to a version of the project management plan as well. For instance, project management plan version 1.3 includes scope management plan version 2.2, schedule management plan version 1.5, quality management plan version 1.1 etc.

It may sound complicated. The configuration management plan helps to organize how to do this versioning, including numbering, when will a new version be published, when a new version of the project management plan must be taken etc. These are all described in this plan.

In other words, Configuration Management plan describes how to do the versioning of changes in a project.

What is Configuration Management System?

Configuration management system helps in managing versioning of project management plans, documents and project components.

This system may include Change Control System. Because the major cause of taking a new version for a component, document or plan in a project is a change. Therefore, change control systems might be under the configuration management system in a company.

Configuration Management system is Part of Project Management Information System (PMIS). It contains organization’s standardized configuration management tools, processes, and procedures. These describe common rules, policies, and procedures on how to do versioning in projects. In other words, configuration management system includes everything for versioning in a project.

In this article, we have defined what configuration management plans and system are. For further information about these important concepts of project management, you may enroll in one of the CAPM courses and be sure that as a project manager you will be able to increase the success of your project.