13.6 Project Manager

The project manager has overall responsibility for a given project and the product created. This person is responsible for planning configuration management according to project requirements and seeing that it's performed. This includes partly what the employees produce and partly what the project manager produces (project plans).

To be able to define and scope configuration management, the project manager must understand its requirements and be able to administer them, with respect to both the company and to customers and suppliers. The project manager must also understand the relevance of configuration management and be able to pass on this understanding to those working on the project. It's also an advantage if the project manager has a good knowledge of configuration management in general, not just as it relates to the project.

Configuration management should be part of the activities included in planning and budgeting a project. The project manager must ensure that necessary resources for people and infrastructure are included in the planning and are actually provided. For the part of the task related to configuration management, activities may be

• Producing and updating a configuration management plan in agreement with the overall project plan

• Identifying necessary configuration management roles for the project

• Assigning responsibility for configuration management activities in accordance with identified roles

• Allocating resources for configuration management

• Following up on planned configuration management activities

These activities are important in getting configuration management implemented and properly performed, either in a project or in a company. The project manager's active and visible use of configuration management benefits described below may be a strong incentive to employees in their performance of configuration management.

Benefits

On top of the benefits of placing their own products under configuration management, project managers can use configuration management and the information held therein in performing daily project management work. The project manager may use

• Status reports from the configuration management system concerning configuration items

• Information about event registrations and their progress

• Measurements produced from the configuration management system, concerning both configuration management itself and other processes

Managing Configurations of Project Management Work Products

All configuration management activities should be performed as appropriate for products produced by the project manager.

References

More details about relevant subjects may be found in Chapters 1Change Control, 5, 9, 17, 23, and 25 Metrics for Control of the Performance of CM.