configuration management

Implementing standards and frameworks involves organizing complicated information in order to help technology professionals produce work that is consistent and, by definition, complies with the standard or framework. These same technical wizards often thrive on their individual creative processes. But there are ways to empower and motivate your colleagues while still implementing industry standards and frameworks. This article discusses some of the personality and teamwork issues that you need to consider in this effort.

How does software development fit with your ITIL CMDB? ITIL® has long been recognized as the de facto industry standard for IT service management and the adoption of ITIL has been growing rapidly across the world. IT Service Management (ITSM) derives enormous benefits from a best practice approach. Change management and configuration management are core practices at the heart of ITIL and ISO/IEC 20000, the auditing standard that is aligned with ITIL.

A key part of planning configuration management for our projects is determining how we will manage change. After all, change happens and any good configuration manager is concerned with how it is managed. Unfortunately, more often than not, our processes focus more on controlling change than on managing it. That is, we put a lot of effort into trying to keep change from happening and relatively less effort into ensuring that when (not if, but when) change happens, we manage it effectively.

If you're planning a configuration management (CM) project, it's time to build a CM Plan. Joe Farah writes on on a number of areas that need to be addressed in your plan in order to follow software configuration management (SCM) best practices.