- Projects tend to have a lot of documentation and sometimes this can be a little overwhelming for project managers to deal with. Configuration management is all about dealing with all of this documentation effectively and making sure it's always up to date. For instance, you'll have documents like project plans and business cases. Configuration management is all about making sure these are up to date and making sure that the people who are responsible for each of these documents is aware of the changes. To help you with your own configuration management, we'll go through the five step configuration management process in this video. To start things off, you'll need to plan the configuration management process and all of its activities. This should create some guidelines for the levels of configuration management you think your project needs. This includes important information on how the project will use important assets like specialist tools and who is responsible for them. Next, you need to identify configuration items and dependencies. Every single configuration item needs some kind of unique identification with documented related attributes. These could be things like the type of item, who owns it, and its status. Next you'll need to apply change control to any configuration item. As changes to the baseline scope are implemented, all configuration items impacted need to be updated and the people responsible for the must be aware of how they're impacted. Following any changes is important to create records and reports that will help demonstrate traceability. Basically, you're looking to ensure status accounting is possible through making sure that the current status of changed configuration items is up to date with version control. Finally, you'll need to verify the integrity of configuration before use. You can do this by reviewing all configuration items at decision gates to make sure they're still viable. This is especially important at project handover to ensure that the latest version of the project asset is delivered. And that's it for this video. While configuration management might seem like an overly bureaucratic process, it will help you achieve project success, by managing all of the documents and assess related to a project and understanding how changes to these impact the project.