Based upon CMstat’s decades of experience serving its Aerospace and Defense industry customers, we know firsthand that most users of Configuration Management (CM) software and recipient consumers of CM data are not design engineers in the early stages of a new product or program.

A new training course from CMstat will provide an introduction to the Principles of Applied GEIA859 Enterprise Data Management (DM) with emphasis on what the practical application of DM truly entails for a product, project, program, or enterprise. Students will gain an understanding of DM functions and how they work in concert to enable best-in-class management, identification, storage, protection and access control of all types of data.

In this month’s CMsights we speak with Lisa Fenwick, Vice President of CMstat, to ask her the most important questions about performing Configuration Management Assessments. Lisa is a CMPIC Certified CM Assessor with 15 years’ worth of successful CM Assessments from over 25 years of CM experience. Lisa serves as the lead instructor for CMPIC’s Course 7 – CM Assessor Certification.

CMstat has announced the addition of Dave Allen to its team of Configuration Management and Data Management professionals. In his new role Dave will serve as the company’s executive representative and business ambassador to the Aerospace & Defense Industry.

In this month’s CMsights we examine the important yet often misunderstood role of Configuration Management Champions within an organization. In a recent CMsights post we explored the obstacles to Getting Managers to Care About Configuration Management and asked readers for their own experience of making CM more important.  The top three responses cited by readers can all be traced to misconceptions that managers have about the CM function which CM Champions can remedy.

We at CMstat often hear comments that too many senior managers do not really care about Configuration Management until there is a product failure, or worse, a system-wide shut down. In this month’s CMsights we are pausing to ask our readers for insights as to what has been their experience in getting managers, directors, and executives to care about CM, even if only enough to understand what it is and is not.

There are numerous uses of Configuration Management (CM) within the Aerospace & Defense industry outside of an OEM’s product engineering organization where rudimentary change control and configuration management may have been implemented as part of an engineering-centric PDM system.

This CMsights article illustrates one example “As-Configured” case study including the customer business challenges, CM deficiencies discovered, why existing tools were inadequate, requirements for a new solution, and the results attained along with benefits to the customer.

Over the past few years in our CMsights blog we have answered FAQs that we hear about Configuration Management and Configuration Management Software, especially from new product, project, or program managers. In our latest post we are sharing a Configuration Management blog bibliography – or “CM Blogography” – that we hope will be a quick reference compendium for those managers seeking to learn more about CM.

The implementation of configuration management must start with a well-conceived Configuration Management Plan. The CM Plan should address a number of elements important in the development, implementation, interoperability, usage, maintenance and evolution of an organization’s configuration management goals, vision, strategy, processes, best practices, desired competencies and supporting technologies including software.

This month’s CMsights shares CMstat Vice President Lisa Fenwick’s presentation from CMPIC’s CM Trends 2022 conference on “How Much Configuration Management is Good Enough?”

Learn what are the eight critical functions for “good CM” within the five foundational pillars of CM, such as Planning and Management, by downloading the presentation for immediate viewing.

This month’s CMsights looks at the why, what, who, and how of performing a Configuration Management Assessment (CMA). But first, what exactly is a CMA?

A CMA typically provides a fact-finding review and independent analysis of current CM-related processes, plans, performance gaps, best practices support, personnel competencies, standards adherence, and deployed software. A comprehensive CMA will also identify and prioritize prospective improvements to any elements found deficient.

There are numerous contributing factors which have caused the process of managing CDRLs (and SDRLs) to become not only a more arduous task, but at the same time increasingly important to the bottom-line performance of a DoD program or profitability of a supplier’s contract. Thankfully, as the efficient handling of CDRLs has become more demanding to orchestrate, best practices (BP) have emerged over recent years from a number of contractors, government agencies, industry associations, and CDRL data management software tool providers like CMstat.

After our last post on the Challenges of Implementing Configuration Management, a reader asked if the impediments to deploying configuration management were very different between a modest-size single-production facility versus a large multi-national multi-site enterprise. Our answer was both “No” and “Yes.”

Throughout CMstat’s history we have witnessed firsthand numerous obstacles that high-tech industries, like aerospace and defense, have experienced when implementing a Configuration Management (CM) strategy with supporting software tools. As with many new or rapidly-evolving technologies, most barriers in the successful deployment and adoption of CM are not overly technical in nature. Instead, they tend to be educational, organizational, procedural or contextual at their core.

Once upon a time, the process of managing Contract Data Requirement Lists (CDRL) and Subcontract Data Requirement Lists (SDRL) in support of government and commercial contracts in aerospace and defense was simple enough that data managers and project planners could perform most of what was required using spreadsheets.

What is the most frequent obstacle encountered by an organization developing, implementing, or repairing their Configuration Management strategy and execution? It is the misunderstanding among product managers, program managers, and business-line executives who think that change control management is configuration management. It is not!

Much has been recently written about the use of Configuration Management (CM) as products, equipment, systems, and infrastructures (both physical and digital) become more complex to design and maintain with frequent configuration changes over longer lifecycles of consumer use or asset deployment. As a result, the role of configuration management continues to rapidly expand and evolve, creating new challenges, opportunities and decisions for CM professionals, industry practitioners and solution providers.

In this month’s CMsights we speak with Lisa Fenwick, Vice President of Product Development for CMstat, to better understand what exactly is Change Implementation Planning and Verification. It’s a timely topic because many product and project managers are justifiably confused by the overlapping terms change control, change management, change implementation…