Why does everyone get confused between Change Management System and Configuration Management System?

I get this question a lot:

"Varun, what the hell is this Configuration Management System? I get confused between Configuration Management Plan and Change Management Plan. It drives me nuts."

Hahaha. Sounds familiar? Without waiting longer, let's go straight into explaining both of these. Most of you know I love to explain things using real life examples, so I will continue doing that.

Configuration Management System

You must be wondering, why is there a picture of a rock band in a phone display while I am trying to explain Configuration Management System. There is some relevance to it, this phone is just an end result of a long project which went through series of changes using both Change Management and Configuration Management Systems.

When we begun this phone looked somewhat like this!

Damn! That's a significant amount of change.

Imagine that you were a part of this team responsible for making this phone. So, it is fair to consider that our initial requirement was to manufacture a phone with the following 4 basic features (A high level rundown):

• Tiny 2 inches screen
• 2 inches space for keypad
• 3 Mega-pixel camera
• 4 GB memory

You and your team worked very hard to create multiple prototypes and presented all of them to your client. The client rejected all your prototypes as none of them were up to par with the current trend of smart phones in the market. Hence, the client revised the requirements for you to start working on and deliver based on it.

New requirements are:

• Big 6 inches screen
• Touch screen
• 12 Mega-pixel camera
• 128 GB memory

This is Configuration Management System. Simply put, for changes which determine how to deal with product specifications we use Configuration Management System.

Change Management System

Now you cannot simply change the requirements because the client asked you to. You have to follow a proper Change Control Process. Imagine your Change Control Board (CCB) carried out an impact analysis and came up with following results:

1. Changing the 2 inches screen to 6 inches screen will take 2 months of time and a budget of $10,000.
2. Changing from keypad to touch screen will take another 3 months of time and a budget of $50,000.
3. Changing 3 Mega-pixel camera to 12 Mega-pixel camera will take 1 month of time and a budget of $5,000.
4. Finally, changing 4GB of memory space to 128 GB space will take 2.5 months of time and a budget of $40,000

After several rounds of discussions these changes were approved by CCB and change log and other baselines were updated. So, a step by step procedure of a "Change" from identification of a change to documenting it in change control form, sending it to CCB for review/impact analysis to updating baselines/change log is done using Change Management System.

A step by step process of a change is Change Management System and what product specifications will change/is allowed to change is done through Configuration Management System.

Ready to take the next steps?

I hope this short article made your life a little easier. If you believe it did and you want more such explanantion with real life examples check out more in depth explanantion of various PMP^® topics HERE. Also, since you read the article till the end, as a bonus, I have attached a video explaining Perform Integrated Change Control Process, do watch it and please share your feedback with me at varun.anand@eduhubspot.com.