12.2 Person Responsible for Assets

The holder of this role is responsible for assets, or components for reuse, that are produced and used in product development. This includes ensuring that assets fulfill the requirements expected of them and maintaining them under configuration management. Configuration management of assets is essential, because changes to these may have far-reaching effects on products and projects.

Configuration management should be part of activities taken into consideration while planning and budgeting in an organizational unit that deals with developing assets or components for reuse. The person responsible for the assets must ensure that necessary resources for people and infrastructure are included in the planning and are actually provided.

The person responsible for assets is in contact with many people, who may have contradictory requirements for the assets. Therefore, it's important from a configuration management point of view for the person holding this role to have solid knowledge about

  • Principles of configuration management in general

  • The company's way(s) of performing configuration management

  • The products, projects, and objectives, at a level that allows effective assessment of the consequences of change requests

  • The fundamental rules of diplomacy in dealing with people

All configuration management activities must be performed for assets. It's essential to be aware of the following:

  • Asset descriptions must be defined. Presumably more than ordinary metadata is needed for useful assets to be easy to find.

  • Evaluation and acceptance of new assets is crucial to maintain quality.

  • All users of assets should be given detailed information when an asset configuration item is released in a new version, so they can decide whether to use it.

Different Process Descriptions

Configuration management may be performed differently in different places in the company. Differences may be culturally or historically defined and/or defined by tools. Although it might be desirable for these differences to be as small as possible or nonexistent, differences do occur in most companies. They become even clearer in connection with configuration management of assets, where technical interfaces cross organizational borders.

It may be naming conventions, which have to be defined in relation to naming conventions for different products. It may also be that procedures for placing products in storage or releasing them for usage are different. Therefore, the person responsible for assets must be careful when producing the relevant process descriptions.

References

More details on related subjects may be found in Chapters 5, 21Internal Asset Development (Product-Line Approach), and 23.



Configuration Management Principles and Practice
Configuration Management Principles and Practice
ISBN: 0321117662
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 181

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net