KPAs and Configuration Management: How Does Your Organization Stack Up?
We hear a lot of talk these days about KPAs and ITIL process areas. KPAs (Key Process Areas) are used to help develop and measure the benchmarked standards of ITIL and are a good way of measuring your organization’s ‘maturity’ level within an ITIL process area (such as Configuration Management
KPAs apply to a repeatable maturity level. In the Infrastructure Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), a repeatable maturity level means that the most important processes have been introduced and the effective structure of the IT process in question is predictable, and the provision of its IT-related services is repeatable.
So what about KPAs associated with Configuration Management? The main purpose of Configuration Management is to establish and maintain the integrity of products that are subject to or part of IT services. Configuration Management involves the identification of the relevant hardware and software components that need to be put under configuration control. Changes to the configuration are evaluated with respect to the service level agreement and with respect to possible risks for the integrity of the configuration.
A Configuration Management plan covers the Configuration Management activities to be performed, the schedule of the activities, the assigned responsibilities, the resources required (including staff, tools and computer facilities) and the CM requirements and activities to be performed by the service delivery group and other related groups
With all these things in mind, you may be able to develop and benchmark your Configuration Management KPAs using the following questions. Remember that each question has three possible answers of (1) consistently (2) inconsistently (3) never. Which category your answers fall into will quickly steer your assessment of configuration management maturity as either consistent (repeatable), inconsistent or having no organized approach
Try your hand at some of these questions and see how your organization ranks against best practices.
Keep up the good work until next time.
Also, Don’t forget to register for Evergreen’s change management webinar: Take Change Management from Firefighting to Fire Prevention
Don
- Is a Configuration Management plan prepared for each service according to a documented procedure?
- Is a documented and approved Configuration Management plan used as the basis for performing the Configuration Management activities?
- Is a Configuration Management library system established as a repository for the configuration base lines?
- Are the products to be placed under Configuration Management identified?
- Are action items for all configuration items/units initiated, recorded, reviewed, approved, and tracked to closure according to a documented procedure?
- Are action items for all configuration items/units initiated, recorded, reviewed, approved, and tracked to closure according to a documented procedure, by an automated process or toolset?
Hi Don
For a company like mine, keeping pace with the evolution of ITIL and all it encompasses is a necessary task, so we can ensure that the IT Asset, Service and Security Management tools that we develop can at least fulfill ITIL’s requirements when in the right hands. So your post here was very useful, and the comments about the ‘federated’ nature of an organization’s CMDB much appreciated.
There is one aspect of Configuration information which I feel is very often missed from these schemas, in relation to the application software installed across an organization. That is, there is usually no information on the profile of usage of the application, at either the individual desktop level, or indeed across the organization as a whole. Once an application has been rolled out, it tends to get accepted as simply ‘there’, and there is no information as to whether it is actually used, by who and how much.
We sometimes get pulled into discussion of the introduction of application streaming, which is great and exciting technology, but we usually have to start by pulling people back to the basics, installing our Application Usage Monitoring component, and finding out more about just what software the organization is really using.
I see the CMDB as the natural default repository for this information, but would appreciate your comments on that idea.