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CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT
The delegates liked the idea that the roles and responsibilities of the CM team
should be defined up front, as part of the vision, rather than after tools have been
deployed. The approach in Chapter 8 promotes a focus on ‘business outcomes’
rather than the needs of any particular tool.
Selecting the right scope for an initial implementation can really help to get
started. One option that works successfully is to implement configuration
management for a business critical service (see Chapter 5). Often a new service
or technology provides an opportunity to implement configuration management,
for example a technology refresh programme, releasing a new application service
or moving into a new data centre.
When getting started, it is important to create a shared understanding of the
IT organisation’s culture and current capability in delivering solutions and
services. Benchmarking your organisation’s capability in managing IT and
services against industry standards is a useful start. Your starting point will
affect the strategy for implementation. At lower levels of organisational and
process capability maturity, configuration management supports effective and
efficient change management and improved incident and problem management.
There is less integration of processes at lower levels of organisational maturity.
The level of maturity also impacts the selection of stakeholder groups.
Configuration management often supports release management and deployment
of systems and services across the service lifecycle and many stakeholder
groups will be involved. The conference identified key stakeholders as the service
desk, service delivery and operations teams. If you integrate configuration
management with other service management activities there are clearly
opportunities to demonstrate added value.
This chapter confirms the useful metrics and key performance indicators that
help develop a business case and benefit delivery. Many practitioners seek
improvements in business and service performance. Improved performance is
enabled by reduced downtime, less incidents, faster times to restore service and
higher change success rates. There are also opportunities to improve productivity
while reducing costs and risks.
Chapter 6 highlighted the role of measurement, monitoring and control in order
to ensure that a system, product, process or service is configured correctly and/or
that it functions exactly as specified. Many of the techniques delegates suggested
in Chapter 6 are processes that enable detection of configuration, CMS or process
failures. Appropriate measures and controls should be defined and monitored
across the software, systems and service lifecycle to validate the configuration
and to identify improvement opportunities.
Supporting tools and technology enable automation of many IT activities, but it is
important to select tools based on a good understanding of the requirements.
Practitioners explore the solution options with the different stakeholders to
obtain feedback on the feasibility of each option. Chapter 7 outlined a practical
approach to defining the requirements for configuration management and a CMS
using a top-down approach. Conference participants liked the idea of use case
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