What About Configuration Management?

There is an incredible amount of confusion around Configuration Management. And, for good reason. It’s critical to IT process. It’s essential for efficient incident, problem, change and release management. Capacity and Availability have essential interdependencies with Configuration Management. And how about Financial Management? How do you implement Configuration Management when ITIL does little to counter the confusion. Well, look at how a current client approached ITIL in general and Configuration Management specifically. We started with an executive overview. We then did a vision/mission session. The vision session was followed 6 weeks later by ITIL Foundations Training. They built their own ITIL roadmap, which included configuration management, based on what we did to that point. Their people now understand how this all works and are beginning to take ownership. They determined they needed help with Configuration Management. I'm now working to help them with what I call the "Control Suite" workshop in which we look, in depth, at Change, Release and Configuration management with some additional time spent on Service Level, Capacity and Availability. In that workshop they will establish their configuration management process objectives, controls, processes and ultimately policies. This methodical approach helps them internalize ITIL best practices rather than me coming in and "doing it to them". And oh, by the way, they will do all this BEFORE they buy a tool to automate their processes.

What you see out of this is cost savings and efficiencies as the benefits, not primary objectives, of process improvement. The objectives are always customer-defined and the program is structured in such a way that the key milestones do have real, tangible benefits in the short term. This keeps the momentum running.