Growing from Pilot to Deployment - ITIL Configuration Management

The key t successful deployment is to break up the work into manageable pieces. You can organize geographically, planning to roll out configuration management location by location. You could also organize by business unit, moving from division to division until everyone is participating fully in configuration management. Hybrid approaches are also quite possible to get to a finer level of detail. Think of each piece as a component of your overall deployment project. Each piece will have a scope, although not necessarily one that is formally documented. Each piece will have a set of tasks, and those tasks are likely to be repeated for each piece that is of the same type. Each of those tasks will be repeated for each “piece” of work that involves getting workstation data at a site, but the tasks might be slightly different for a different kind of piece.

There are multiple paths toward a full production roll out.

Rolling out configuration management involves documenting the pieces, delegating them to small work teams for execution, and then managing the communication and the execution through all the different pieces you’ve defined.

The first piece of deployment will require as much attention as pilot. Though the schedule might be slightly delayed, the second piece should be executed before attempting to execute any other pieces. If this executes flawlessly, then you can speed up the process. Your overall plan will actually be accelerated if you plan these breaks into the schedule and use them to improve the effectiveness of your work teams. During these pauses in the schedule, you can also evaluate your resource needs against your risk.

After your deployment activities reach a good pace, it is time to start thinking about being finished. It seems an odd situation, but many times projects don’t know when they are finished. This is especially true with configuration management projects in organizations that haven’t thought very deeply about this topic before.