Each month the CM Journal provides original content articles and regular columns from industry thought leaders and software providers on a wide variety of configuration management and application lifecycle management topics.
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Change Control or Control of Changes
Volume 7 - Number 5 - May 2009
Many people will tell you that the only constant is Change. Configuration Management best practices helps technology teams to manage the rapid application, build, packaging and deployment of complex systems. Change Control is one of the most important functions (and often overlooked) to help you keep your Software and Systems development efforts on track. This month our talented writers give you the information that you need to successfully implement Change Control to improve your team's productivity along with improving the quality of the application itself.
To get us started Chayim Kirshen gives us Options for Promoting and Controlling Changes in Risk Adverse Environments while Steve Berczuk, Brad Appleton and Robert Cowham tell us to "Keep the Change". Joe Farah shows us the Next Generation of Change Management and Alan Koch reminds us to Welcome Change. Ben Weatherall is Grokking Change and Leslie Sachs has been evesdropping on me again as she discusses some of the Personality issues that often come up when you try to implement Change Control in Personality Matters. (I met all these all guys!)
I couldn't resist taking a look back at Dick Carlson's discussion about Business Change Management and Ryan Lloyd's observations about Managing Change Churn and Complexity. Mario Moreira gives us Antipatterns of Change Control and naturally, I jump in to discuss the factors you need to consider when implementing Change Control in your organization. Change Control is a critical function in any organization and you've come to the right place to learn how to successfully implement Change Control and, of course, control changes in large or small organizations.
Bob Aiello
Editor in Chief
CM Crossroads
raiello@acm.org
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Keep The Change
by Steve Berczuk, Brad Appleton, and Robert Cowham
Software Development teams deliver value by writing new code, or by changing existing code and functionality. The majority of the time it is about changing existing systems, not writing completely new ones. Software Configuration Management is one of the disciplines responsible for managing that change. Rapid, unmanaged, change can cause chaos and reduce productivity. One (easy) way to reduce that chaos is to reduce the frequency of change.
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CM: THE NEXT GENERATION of Change Control
by Joe Farah
CM is about managing configurations. This means identifying the configuration and managing changes to it. Managing changes to the configuration is the domain of Change Control. A good change control process and toolset will help ensure that only the appropriate changes are being made to a product, will allow the team to focus on change management rather than configuration management, and will give the team easy access to all configuration and change data, including full traceability information.
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Welcoming Change
by Alan Koch
Once, a really long time ago - at least according to the Judaeo-Christian tradition - Adam was charged with naming things. Let's pretend he didn't and the family is talking around the campfire...The father, talking to his son, says, "I am going to snarf an elephant for blurb. Do you want to greep a mouse for me?" "What is a greep?"
"Greep? I said get me a prud. How else can I capture a cat?"
"Is this a prud?" the son asked, holding up a club.
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Grokking Change
by Ben Weatherall
This month's topic is "Change Control or Control of Changes." This implies that these are two distinct things, or at least two distinct ways of looking at this critical function. So after a lot of personal angst, I decided to take both tacks and see how they could be brought together. Typically, "change" is used in relation to code, documentation or requirements. The form most commonly used is "to transform" from something to something else. But we deal with other things that change all the time; things such as processes and procedures, tool chains, and development methodologies. We talk about "Continuous Process Improvement" which also mandates that "something changes."
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Personality Matters - Change Control or Control of Changes
by Leslie Sachs
Creating a Change Control group (or any other Process Improvement effort) can be incredibly successful or else it can get bogged down with impossible "people" issues - often due to conflicting communication styles and personalities. If you want your team to be a success then you may need to consider some of these "people" issues - or else risk failure due to personality issues that really matter. It's not hard to address these challenges and build a Change Control function that will succeed despite some of the inherent challenges in getting people, who may have very different styles and approaches, to work together.
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Business-Level Change Management
by Dick Carlson
For more than 10 years, change management has been a key process among CEOs for organizational change. The term change management is interpreted in different ways. One can look at change management as a catch all term that applies to not only the business and solution domains, but also an enterprise-level process. To some, change management is synonymous with configuration management (CM). To others, change management is a means to manage organizational changes.
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Managing Change Churn and Complexity
by Ryan Lloyd
Reducing Risk and Driving Efficiency With Release Management
Managing Releases in a High Volume Change Environment
Change is a reality in every organization and life continues to get more complicated through trends such as the adoption of Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and the rationalization or modernization of legacy applications.
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Antipatterns of Change Control
by Mario Moreira
Have you ever seen people brainstorm ideas to solve problems but have their solution fail miserably? Their heart and intentions are in the right place, but due to a number of forces, the solution is not effective and typically misses important factors that can make it a good working solution.
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Behaviorally Speaking - Change Control or Control of Changes
by Bob Aiello
Change Control is a critical CM function that is often misunderstood and many technology professionals do not fully comprehend when to use Change Control while even fewer really grasp how to implement an effective and efficient Change Control function. Done right, Change Control can be the basis for all of your Software (and Systems) Configuration and Release Management practices.
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