Configuration management and change control.
Any issues which arise pre-project in the Starting Up a Project process, are captured in the Daily Log and managed by the project manager. However, when the project is in the initiating stage, the Initiating a Project process creates the Configuration Management Strategy, and at the same time creates the Issue Register.
These are the project controls for managing issues, changes and configuration management. There are also a range of management products that support this, and they are: Configuration Item Records, Product Status Accounts, and Issue Reports. These are in addition to the three management products mentioned above.
Every project needs a configuration management system that supports impact assessments, the relationships between products, and maintains products baselines, the basis on which the entity will change.
The first step is for a project to determine if there are any corporate or programme policies and processes that should be applied and ensure that they are built into the Configuration Management Strategy Document.
The Configuration Management Strategy Document should include the following information:
The Configuration Management Procedure to be used and any common terminology, the procedure for managing issues and change control, tools, techniques, and records that will be kept, how the procedure performance will be reported, timing of key configuration management activities, issue and change control activities, and the roles and responsibilities for configuration management and issue and change control activities.
Since the Configuration Management Strategy defines the way that issues are to be dealt with, then the project board and project manager needs to agree a scale for prioritising issues, a scale for rating the severity of issues, and which management levels can handle which levels of issue severity.
As an example the project board may consider delegating the authority for dealing with requests to change or off specifications to a Change Authority.
Another consideration that needs to be decided in the initiation stage, is whether the project board will set up a Change Budget to fund the cost of requests for change, and may be even their analysis costs.
If a change authority is to be set up, then the project board will need to determine the rules of engagement, for example the maximum cost of any single change. If such a budget is used it should be documented in the relevant plan.
Configuration Item Records.
These describe information such as the status, version and variant of each configuration item and described in the important relationships between each item, for example a physical relationship as in a bottle and its cap.
Product Status Account. This provides information about the state of products within defined limits, for example the whole project, a specific stage, or a type of product. It is a report usually called for by either Project assurance all the project manager wishing to confirm the latest status of a range of products.
Issues can be dealt with formally or informally, if the latter then the Daily Log will be used to record and manage such issues. For all formal issues, the Issue Register will be used. Whenever an issue is logged on the Issue Register, it will be accompanied by an Issue Report.
The Issue Register is used to capture and maintain information on all formal issues. The Issue Report contains the description, impact assessment and recommendations for any requests for change, specification or a problem concern.
Configuration Management and Change control.
No matter how many projects you will work on in your professional life, every single one of them will be subject to some form of change, whether it’s your customer changing their mind or specification problems, or the outside world changing, change is inevitable.
It therefore makes good sense to embed a process for managing change at the start of each project, and this must include a systematic approach that covers the identification, assessment and control of any changes that arise.
In PRINCE2 all changes are treated as a type of project issue. Any issues that the potential to impact the project’s performance targets of time, cost, quality, scope, risk and benefits.
It is often misunderstood, but the objective of issue and change control procedures are not to prevent changes, but rather, to ensure that every change is first agreed by the relevant authority before it is implemented.
The first important aspect to consider is the answer to the question “how will we know when a change is requested to what we currently have?”.
The answer is to record the version details of each product, both management and specialist, once they had been signed off, and these are called a Baseline.
Therefore, a pre-requisite of affected issue and change control is the establishment of an appropriate configuration and management system which records baselines for the project products and ensures that the correct versions are delivered to the customer.
Configuration Management and Change Control
There is therefore a very close relationship between change control and configuration management, for this reason the change control administration normally takes place within your configuration management group. Within PRINCE2, configuration management is normally supplied from within Project Support.
It is therefore important that all issues and changes that may affect the projects baselines, first identified, then assess, and either approve, rejected or deferred.
Configuration management is the technical and administrative activity concerned with the creation, maintenance and controlled change of configuration throughout the life of a product (or item).
A configuration item is an entity that is subject to configuration management. The entity may be a component of a product, a product or a set of products that form a release.
A release is a complete and consistent set of products that are managed, tested and deployed as a single entity to be handed over to the user(s). Issue and change control procedures need to be integrated with the configuration management system used by the project.
PRINCE2 uses the term ’issue’ to cover any relevant event that has happened, was not planned, and requires management action. It can be a concern, query, request for change, suggestion or off-specification raised during a project. Project issues can be about anything to do with the project.
Issues may be raised at any time during the project, by anyone with an interest in the project or its outcome. The different types of issue are:
Request for change. A proposal for a change to a baseline. For example, the Senior User would like to upgrade the processor speed for an IT system to comply with the latest software release.
Off-specification. This is something that should be provided by the project, but currently is not (or is forecast not to be) provided. An example here, is a piece of functionality is missing, or a product that is missing.
Problem/concern. Any other issue that the Project Manager needs to resolve or escalate. For example, advice from a supplier that they can no longer deliver one of the products specified by the customer.
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