12.1 Management

Management is responsible for ensuring that the company has a policy for configuration management that effectively supports the company's business goals. This is to say that management should consider how configuration management is to be performed to provide the best possible benefit relative to the cost involved.

Such a policy may be layered. This means that it may be expressed on the project level as well as on the level of cross-organizational activities in the company. Cross-organizational activities may for instance be reuse or maintenance of the company's infrastructure. Configuration management may be performed by an organization-wide functional unit, like a process office, or locally in the projects. It may be done with a higher or lower degree of formalism.

Managers have a great responsibility in terms of being role models for employees and thereby signaling company values. Managers contribute indirectly to the performance of configuration management in general by performing configuration management on the objects for which they are directly responsible, such as master plans. This enables management to get a feeling for what configuration management is and what the benefits are for the company. Management also contributes by requiring, and allocating resources to, configuration management on other cross-organizational objects, such as sales material.

Defining and Tracking Goals

Based on a general knowledge of configuration management principles, management should establish goals for configuration management in the company and track fulfillment of those goals. As part of the support for the goals, it's management's responsibility to provide

• Active support of implementation or improvement of configuration management

  - Asking for configuration management plans and tracking progress

  - Allocating and prioritizing necessary resources for both people and infrastructure

• Active support for employees working with configuration management

  - Producing job descriptions for configuration management roles

  - Including configuration management activities in other job descriptions

  - Defining career possibilities in configuration management with the company

Benefits

A company gains many benefits in performing appropriate configuration management, from the top manager being able to track master plans and visions to the newest developer or administrative assistant being able to find and trust the processes describing their tasks .

References

More details on related subjects may be found in Chapters 5 ( especially Examples), 6Types of Objects in Cross-Organizational Perspective, and 25.