Configuration vs Change Management

There is a difference between configuration management and change management.

There is quite a bit of overlap between these two terms, configuration management and change management, and I can tell you there is a lot of confusion around what these two terms mean. They are considered two separate processes, two separate approaches to managing changes within your organization. One has to do with configurations, obviously, and the other one has to do with just making changes in general. So what we're going to do is attempt to break apart these two terms and really understand what they're talking about.

Configuration Management

Just like it sounds, configuration management has to do with configuration, and this can apply to projects, it can apply to hardware, it can apply to motors, it could apply to projects, it could apply to a lot of different aspects. But what we're going to do is apply it to software, because it's the easiest for us to understand. If we are configuring software, we have a bunch of settings on that software and we are changing those settings to this software, and so this is a perfect example of configuration. How do we manage the change, and how do we manage these configurations on our devices and in our software?

So what this process might look like is that we start creating baseline configurations. We start capturing what our configurations are for this software. Then what we do is we decide that we want to create some sort of versioning with this, so that when we make changes we can address what version we're on, and we can address what is the best version for us, or where are we, where have we been and where are we going — we can address those types of questions. Then we get into the change control process: how do we implement changes to configurations in a controlled way, and make sure that versioning is happening, and make sure that our baselines are getting updated, and what that process looks like. And then how do we go through testing those configurations to make sure that they're correct, and then also maybe some sort of audit process to make sure that everything is functioning well.

Change Management

The change management process is concerned with how we make changes to the organization. Maybe we make changes to software that we're rolling out. Maybe we have a server and we're rolling out new software on it. We're not exactly configuring it in that case; in this case we're setting up all new software. So what we need to do is we need to go through a process here which starts out with a change request, goes through a planning phase, an evaluation, an implementation phase, monitoring, and change closure. So there's this process that we do to make changes.

Where the Confusion Comes In

Now, where the confusion comes in is that part of configuration management has a change management process. Well, that sounds like change management is within configuration management, and a lot of people have argued that point, that change management is a part of configuration management. And then also I would say that any change you're making is really a change to configuration, so configurations is a part of change management.

So really I feel like the two are really interrelated, and that's why we're going to actually treat them as being the same thing. Throughout this module we're just going to talk about change management. I'm going to refer to it as change management, because most of what we're going to talk about really is change management, and we're not going to get too involved into the configuration management side of it. But the biggest thing is I just want you to understand that there is a difference between these two terms. We're mainly going to talk about change management. There is a slight difference with configuration management, but we'll talk about some aspects of configuration management as we go.