Episode 20 — Establish Configuration Management Plan
In Episode Twenty, titled “Establish Configuration Management Plan,” we build a living plan for controlled change that you can run every week without drama. Configuration Management (C M) is the quiet backbone of authorization and operations because it decides how ideas become safe reality. A good plan reduces surprise by making every alteration visible, deliberate, and reversible. It also creates a shared language for engineers, security reviewers, and authorizing officials so risk is taken on purpose, not by accident. Think of this as a rhythm more than a document: a cadence of requests, reviews, deployments, and verifications that produces stable systems and clean evidence. When the rhythm is steady, assessments feel like confirmation and incidents feel like short stories with clear endings, not epics.
Your plan’s objectives are simple to say and powerful in practice: stability, traceability, and authorized risk-taking. Stability means a user’s Tuesday looks like their Monday unless a planned change says otherwise, and that you can recover quickly when a release misbehaves. Traceability means every alteration leaves a trail—who asked, who approved, what changed, when it landed, and where proof lives—so auditors and operators follow the same breadcrumbs. Authorized risk-taking acknowledges that progress always carries uncertainty; the plan provides guardrails so teams can move fast without gambling. These objectives keep you honest when schedules get tight. If a shortcut weakens stability, hides the trail, or sidesteps authorization, it is not a shortcut. It is a future incident with your name on it.
Roles anchor accountability, so define them by action rather than by department. Requesters propose a change in plain language and link it to a business or security outcome. Reviewers analyze impact across security, performance, and user experience, and record concerns that must be resolved before approval. Approvers accept the residual risk for the scope at hand; in many shops this is a Change Advisory Board (C A B) for significant releases and a delegated approver for standard items. Implementers execute the change through controlled mechanisms—pipelines, playbooks, or consoles with recording turned on—and verify the result against success criteria. Auditors, whether internal or a Third Party Assessment Organization (3 P A O), read the trail later to ensure the process was followed. One person can wear multiple hats in small teams, but each hat must still be visible on the record.
Identify configuration items clearly so everyone edits the same truth. Code includes application sources, service definitions, and tests. Infrastructure covers templates and modules that define networks, compute, storage, and security controls through Infrastructure as Code (I A C). Images include base operating system builds, container images, and golden virtual machine snapshots, each versioned and scanned before use. Parameters capture the specific values your program relies on—timeouts, retention periods, authentication rules—and tie directly to a parameter register. Documentation is a configuration item too, because procedures, runbooks, and the System Security Plan depend on versions that match how the system actually operates. When these items are enumerated with owners and repositories, change stops being mystery and becomes managed inventory.
Describe your change workflow as a story that always ends with verification. A requester opens a ticket with purpose, scope, rollback plan, and user impact in full sentences. Reviewers perform impact analysis, check baselines and dependencies, and confirm that monitoring and logging can observe the change. Approvers decide risk acceptance based on that analysis and the calendar, because timing is a control. Implementers deploy via automation or controlled consoles, following the steps recorded in the plan. Verification confirms the system behaves as intended using predefined tests, metrics, logs, and user checks where appropriate. The ticket then captures outcomes, evidence pointers, and any deviations. This flow is not overhead. It is the skeleton that lets the body move without falling apart.
Emergency changes deserve their own rails because speed without record becomes chaos. Define what counts as an emergency—safety, severe outage, or security exposure—so the label is not used to skip scrutiny on busy days. Grant limited, time-boxed authority to a designated incident commander to approve and execute urgent remediation. Require immediate logging of actions during the event and a post-implementation review within a fixed window, such as forty-eight hours. The review must confirm root cause, verify that compensating changes are folded into the standard workflow, and document lessons learned with owners and dates. Emergencies will happen. The plan’s job is to make them brief, auditable, and unlikely to recur.
Baselining sets your known-good starting point, and documented deviations keep you honest when reality bites. Establish system and software baselines—approved images, hardened configurations, dependency versions, and parameter values—and store them in version-controlled repositories with signatures. Declare allowed deviations in writing with rationale, scope, and sunset dates, then monitor for drift. If a team must temporarily diverge from a baseline to meet a mission need, the plan records the why and the when it will be corrected or institutionalized. This approach turns messy life into managed variance: auditors see judgment rather than improvisation, and engineers see a clear path back to center.
Integrate version control, approvals, and deployment automation as a secure pipeline rather than a pile of tools. All configuration items should flow through source control with protected branches, signed commits for sensitive repositories, and mandatory peer review before merges. Approvals live alongside the code via pull-request gates and linked tickets, so the decision and the artifact travel together. Deployment automation runs with least privilege in separated environments, uses short-lived credentials, and emits logs to a central store so you can replay any step. Secrets are injected at runtime from a managed vault, never baked into artifacts. When this pipeline is tight, you eliminate most classes of “we changed it and forgot where,” because the only way to change is through a visible path.
The most common gotcha is shadow changes—tweaks made outside the workflow on consoles, scripts, or machines that someone “just needed to fix.” Shadow changes bypass review and erase rollback plans because there is nothing to roll back to. The countermeasure is firm and friendly: restrict direct write access to production, record every administrative session, and provide a fast, reliable standard path so engineers are not tempted to cut corners. Pair this with automated drift detection that compares live state to declared configuration and opens tickets when differences appear. When a drift alert fires, the first question is “bring it back or bless it?”—and either answer becomes a recorded change with a rollback plan.
Standard change types deliver a quick benefit by removing friction where risk is low and well understood. Define a handful—routine certificate renewals with overlap windows, scaling policy adjustments within guardrails, patch rollouts that meet your vulnerability policy—and attach predefined acceptance criteria and test steps. Pre-approve these types for a fixed period, provided the criteria are met and evidence is attached. This does not dilute control; it focuses attention on novel or risky work while allowing repetitive, low-risk tasks to move quickly with consistent quality. Over time, add or retire standard types based on experience so the catalog reflects what your system actually needs.
Rehearse failure and rollback so confidence is earned, not assumed. In a realistic scenario, a release degrades response times and error rates climb. Implementers pause rollout automatically because health checks trip guardrails. They invoke the documented rollback using versioned artifacts: the previous image tag, the last known-good database migration checkpoint, and the stored configuration snapshot. Monitoring confirms metrics returning to baseline, and the change ticket records the timeline, the artifacts used, and the point of failure. A follow-up analysis captures root cause and the additional test that would have caught it earlier. This story is not theater; it is the difference between a twelve-minute blip and a twelve-hour incident.
Evidence pointers turn your plan from prose into something assessors can verify without help. Every significant change links to its ticket, the approvals embedded in the pull request, the automated test results, the deployment job logs, and the post-deployment metric snapshots. Administrative sessions include session IDs and recording locations. Baseline definitions reference commit hashes and signature metadata. Emergency reviews point to incident timelines and corrective actions added to the backlog and the Plan of Action and Milestones (P O A and M). When a reviewer asks for “one example last month,” you can open any change and show the same coherent trail from intent to outcome.
A short memory anchor keeps the discipline alive on busy days: no change unreviewed, no review undocumented. Say it at the start of a release call and it will shape decisions. “No change unreviewed” reminds teams that even standard work must meet its criteria and have a recorded approver, and that emergencies are exceptions with their own rails, not loopholes. “No review undocumented” insists that approvals, test evidence, and metrics live where others can find them later. The phrase is plain on purpose; it is hard to wiggle around, and it fits on a sticky note next to the deploy button.
We close by finalizing the Configuration Management plan and moving it from paper to practice. Ensure objectives are named, roles are assigned, configuration items are inventoried, workflows are documented, baselines are published, and pipelines are secured. Confirm that evidence pointers work and that drift detection is active. Then convene the change board with a short agenda: approve the standard change catalog, review the emergency rails, and schedule a monthly rehearsal of rollback for one critical service. A plan that lives in calendars and tools, not just in documents, creates the calm you need to ship improvements week after week while keeping authorization and risk firmly in view.
