Best Practices and Recommendations

Recommendation 1:
Establish Configuration Control Boards to Manage CM-Controlled Items

Configuration Control Boards (CCB) can be established to manage significant changes to CM-controlled items. CCBs must review, approve, disapprove, defer, escalate, or remand change requests (CR) to baselined items.

A CCB must be able to identify the impact of changes across multiple projects and coordinate roll-out. The CCBs conduct impact assessments on a project’s requested changes to determine the following:

• Cost to implement the change

• Schedule impacts and time to implement the change

• Performance characteristics of the change

• Impact on other items within the system

• Impact on system interfaces

• Security impacts

The baselines must be kept current as controlled items are changed.

Recommendation 2:
Projects Should Consider Using CM Automation

The advent of pervasive virtualization and “infrastructure as code” has enabled API-driven automation. Projects should strive to use automation to eliminate inconsistency and variability from processes.

Automation tools such as Chef and Ansible can be used for automating system configuration management activities, while declarative infrastructure automation tools such as AWS CloudFormation can be used to automated platform configuration. Projects are encouraged to use COTS configuration management products rather than developing their own.

When using automation, the configuration files used as input to the tools become the configuration items.