Change Management

Well common practise often interchanges the two, but I personally think of them differently.

Change management seeks to rationalize change based on basic risk analysis techniques - how can we implement a requested change while minimizing the riskof affecting service. We don't bring everything to change management committee - only the potentially service affecting changes on production servers. This could include software changes such as adding a report or implementing a new version of software, as well as hardware changes.

Configuration management is tracking the configuration of a server/desktop so that disaster recovery, root cause analysis etc can be done using the configuration information. We use this in making assumptions regarding the applicability of testing on a test box versus on the production server, enforcing standards etc.

Is there overlap? You bet. Some people use change management for project related change, and configuration for operational/maintenance changes.

James

Good question - and it will take a lot more than the 1930 character length permitted by this forum.

However, you could look at the two as interlocking pieces of the whole systems management puzzle. You have things called "assets" - hardware, network components, system software, middleware, applications, etc. These assets, and their relationship to each other (what things are connected to what, what software (and version) runs on what machine) is what configuration management is all about.Changes (added new assets, changing existing assets, removing them, etc.) is what Change Management is all about. Problem Management is about recording, tracking, solving, and reporting on problems that occur with assets (hardware and network failures, application abends and errors, system software bugs, etc.)

There are many good products on the market that provide modular systems for tracking assets and their configuration information, scheduling and managing changes against those assets, and tracking and solving problems with those assets.

However, Configuration Management is sometimes used in more narrow way to mean software configruation management, which includes source code version control, build management and packaging, and code migration from test to production, to name only a few key features. Again, there are many tools on the market to perform these functions, and some of them interface directly or indirectly with the Asset/Problem/Change Management tools mentionedpreviously.

By the way, the Software Configuration Management tools are normally used and managemed by the IS (development) groups, whereas the Asset/Problem/Change tools are normally owned and operated by the Data Center or Help Desk functions of an organization.

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