Configuration Management (071/100) - Systems Engineering and Product Development Training

configuration management is the technical management process that ensures everyone on the team is working from the same sheet or marching to the beat of the same drum and tracks the evolution of a systems configuration from what is called the build to configuration to the as-built configuration you learn a little bit more about what these terms mean later in this lesson the purpose of configuration management is to establish and maintain configuration control of the systems configuration or any supporting elements for that system not only from a hardware and software standpoint but also from a developmental standpoint for instance the requirements and documentation or other artifacts that support the development of the system also fall under the configuration management umbrella configuration management takes place throughout the entire life of a system beginning during the business or mission analysis and technical process and ending with the disposal of the system any team member that's a part in the system development lifecycle plays a role in the configuration management process most notably subject matter experts systems engineers project managers and the configuration manager they play key roles in configuration management now let's cover the inputs the activities and the outputs of the CM process next the first input for CM is our candidate configuration items configuration items can be anything that needs to be tracked and managed from a configuration standpoint throughout the entire life of the system this includes hardware software conceptual or supporting documentation like specifications or design drawings and other support elements for the system without these elements there would be nothing to control the configuration of their fourth rather intuitive that these play a central role in configuration management as these will be the elements that will manage the configuration of the next input are what are called project change requests or just plain change requests these are the requests to actually change the configuration of one of the configuration items that I just talked about many things can cause a change in the configuration of a configuration item sometimes the supplier for a particular configuration item will force the change into the system that's integrated into or the change could be based on technology that becomes available for use that can help the system perform better or sometimes the customer requests changes to the configuration of the system based on some new relevant information that comes to light during a portion of the developmental lifecycle in any of these cases the change requests will be submitted to the configuration management process where it can be reviewed approved or disproved tracked processed and incorporated that actually does it for inputs into the configuration management process other lesser inputs can include change requests for enhancing the process itself and so on but here we're focused on the more important items let's cover the activities that take place for CM next the first activity as with all the other activities we talked about is to plan for configuration management this typically takes place very early in the life cycle during the inception of the project this will be captured in what's known as the configuration management plan of the CMP the CMP includes the strategy for performing configuration management who's responsible for what and outlines the processes that are going to be used for submitting change requests and how those change requests are evaluated approved verified and validated and tracked as the changes form a new baseline I'll be covering the contents of the configuration management plan when I get to the outputs later in this lesson the next activity is to perform configuration identification during configuration identification the team's going to identify the configuration items that need to be tracked and managed under the CM process and tag those configuration items with identifiable characteristics like identification numbers or configuration numbers the most common term used here are part numbers for Hardware elements and software versions for software elements configuration identification also identifies the baselines that will be established throughout the lifecycle these baselines typically follow major milestones and decision gates with other technical reviews the next activity is to perform configuration change management this is the real meat and potatoes of performing CM this is where the changes actually take place here the change requests are identified recorded reviewed approved or rejected by the configuration Control Board the CCB they're tracked and processed to form a new baseline change requests are coordinated reviewed evaluated and either approved or rejected at joint meetings called configuration control boards or CCB's when a CCB evaluates a change request they're evaluating the impact the change is going to have several areas of the project to include the impact to the parts or the materials of the configuration item being changed any processes or the feasibility of the change the quality impacts are the impacts of the requirements impacts to any interfaces and of course the impact to the project cost schedule and technical performance of the overall system given the assessment of these areas the CCB might reject or approve the change if approved the baseline configuration is updated to reflect the change as a part of the status accounting activity you

Channel: LearnSE Education

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Keywords: systems engineering, engineering, systems, incose, csep, asep, esep, certification, training, technical, project management, product development, development, learnse, 15288, ieee, iso, iec, startup, invention, CM, configuration management, configuration, management, PMP

Id: 1nh8S7KZ_Cw

Length: 5min 7sec (307 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 20 2020