How does Configuration Management enable Agility?

Co-Authors:?Florian B?hme,?Jean-Hervé Poisson?&?Badia Dandana

This is the first article in a new series: CM+Agile. Together we will unravel how Configuration Management enables agility and where there will be room for improvements. The first article will set the scene by addressing the pursuit of the Software Driven Vehicle by Western automotive OEMs.

Revolutionary developments are happening in the automotive industry. At the recent Shanghai Auto Show, where Volkswagen Group battled with its Chinese rivals in the critical markets of electric and software-defined vehicles, Western OEMs start now to compete with Chinese companies such as BYD, which are rapidly closing the gap in the competition with?advanced?technology and extensive smartphone-like software capabilities.

(Source:?Chinese Nightmare in SWdriven by C. Horn)

In order to stay competitive with their new rivals in the coming years, established Western OEMs - which used to engineer, produce, support, and decommission products with unique lifecycles and trusted supply chain partners - have now started to build software competencies and to keep source code inside the company by developing unified and scalable software platforms including selected technology stacks.

On one hand, the development of such a platform requires these OEMS to increase their agility within engineering in a short time and transform people, processes, data, and tools.?On the other hand, Configuration Management (CM) remains crucial in managing these developments and their increased complexity. Without CM, how could you trust your baselines? How could you trust data? How could you trust the product? So the main question is: How can CM and Agile practices strengthen one another to answer these challenges?

How does Configuration Management enable agility?

As paraphrased from?CM2?(from the?IpX - Institute for Process Excellence): CM manages all configuration-relevant information that could impact?safety,?security,?quality,?schedule,?cost,?profit,?the environment,?corporate reputation, or?brand recognition?and has processes in place that:

• accommodate?fast & efficient change
• ensure documentation remains?clear, concise, and valid?
• guards the?integrity?of the configuration
• streamline?communication & collaboration?across functions & organization borders
• continually improve?these practices?

Accommodate?fast & efficient change

The CM2 Change process enables this by distinguishing Fast and Full track changes. When the criteria set by the Change Review Board are met, the individual responsible for the highest level impacted item can decide on a Change Request using the Fast Track route.?

CM2 indicates that the vast majority of changes in a mature organization should go Fast Track. Mature means an organization has a culture that fosters quality and creates a safe space where risks or mistakes can be discussed without repercussions. Doesn't this sound like the mindset that an Agile team aims to develop?

For more complex or higher-risk changes, multiple teams need to be involved depending on the situation, which comes back to communication. In this case, Change Management can support better orchestration between the agile teams involved as well as an interface to possible higher system levels, enabling them to make decisions they need, giving them the authority to allocate their resources to whatever they decide, and letting them implement their solutions.

It is also essential to teach agile teams to grasp the importance of decision-making in change management. A prerequisite is to question the potential consequences before implementing a new feature or bug fix. For instance, teams should always consider whether such a change could potentially render a customer's vehicle unstartable, leading to expensive and time-consuming maintenance at the dealership.

Self-organizing teams

Finally, introduce self-organizing teams around the problem or opportunity you are addressing instead of using stable teams. You create stable knowledge hubs that can be pulled in to achieve a specific goal. According to?Joe Justice?in the video on?Tesla's Secret Process for Rapid Innovation: at Tesla, people come into the factory to check where they can add the most value and join that team to work. In the same?video, Joe Justice mentions that Bosch has a dedicated team that works on the steering rack and brake master cylinder for Tesla and that they deliver a changed product every week: “every one week the steering rack needs to get lighter, cheaper, better, more responsive, better steering feel”. Whether Tesla is the right example, is something only the future can tell. But safe to say, the developments of autonomous capabilities have not gone without incidents which are?still under investigation by NHTSA.?

CM2 enables this by supporting different change tracks with varying levels of authority as mentioned earlier. These levels provide more or less guard rails and more or less autonomy based on the change. CM2 also helps in setting up these teams based on the breakdown of your configurations.

Most companies are not built for agility?by?Dave Gray?-?CC BY-ND 2.0

Ensure documentation remains?clear, concise, and valid?

The quality of documentation for complex electronic platforms is at stake. CM2 indicates that the foundation for the quality of documentation lies in ownership and accountability. Any information item (or, as CM2 calls it, dataset), from a requirement to a piece of code, is owned on a named basis. Why? Because you need to know in case there are questions, changes, issues, or opportunities that require in-depth knowledge about that dataset. This is also supported by other concepts which are currently deployed at automotive OEMs:

“Each data owner is responsible to provide high quality data products that can be consumed by other departments in a decentralized and democratic manner.” (Chris Seiler: TPLE)

You do not want to search and spend hours or days getting someone to talk to. Of course, this seems already the case within agile teams, but when hundreds of persons and dozens of agile teams are developing together a complex platform, thousands of information items are exchanged between them and these exchanges have to be fluid and robust.

Furthermore, CM2 simplifies the release of datasets significantly as only 2 types of parties are relevant for each dataset, the creator and its users. The release process for datasets should not require eight signatures from eight people or department heads. More people do not improve quality. Increase agility by reducing the number of people involved. Wouldn't agile teams be comfortable with this practice?

Guards the?integrity?of the configuration

Understanding where you are and where you need to go and what your next step needs to be is key to ensure the integrity of the configuration baselines. This requires not only status accounting on the actual progress but also knowing which dependencies exist and what interface agreements are in place that need to be guarded. This will also help agile teams develop products as part of complex systems - for example, to reduce errors because of compatibility issues. The CM2 Baseline plays an important part in understanding the dependencies between all running changes.

Culture plays an important role here as well. If managers do not trust their people to do their job, toxic situations can arise leading to ethical fading. And ethical fading will lead to quality escapes as explained in?Ethical Fading eats Configuration Management Principles for Breakfast.?

Streamline?communication & collaboration?across functions & organization borders

Successful projects or agile teams excel in communication both internally within the team as well as across teams. They should use the most efficient way of communication in every situation. E.g., in case you need to use text-based messaging: Text message over Chat over E-mail (the more concise you need to be in conveying the information, the more efficient it will be).

However, requirements are only used (for ordering, or assembly,...) downstream when they are clear, concise, and valid. Communicating a need just via a text message without the proper controls will lead to quality escapes. This is where CM comes in to ensure you can manage these requirements, ensure they are under control, and point to the effective valid set at any given time.?And when possible, always directly refer to the source when you communicate requirements. E.g., on production or purchase orders always list the valid datasets.

Increase the autonomy of teams

When developing a product, smart modularization with clearly defined interfaces and refactoring is essential. This will create more autonomy for teams to develop and improve a module as long as the interface remains intact. Only when interfaces are being impacted it requires collaboration with multiple teams. CM allows you to manage the need for collaboration based on the understanding of the dependencies within the configuration baseline.

Continually improve?and re-invent?these practices?

Measuring progress and analyzing processes through process mining provides data points for improvements.?This process shouldn’t be a tedious task, it should become a strategy of every organization and be understood as a lever to improve competitiveness.

Automation

One way of improving these practices is by automation. Whatever is viable to automate, you must automate to increase quality and speed. However, never forget the human element.

While a digital twin, virtualization, and simulation are critical components to maximize agility, only focusing on implementing a digital twin, virtualization, and simulation capabilities, does not make you agile. You might gain some lead times, but achieving agility or improved CM capabilities mostly requires a cultural change (as most changes do).

Refactoring and Re-use

Another essential?method to improve your working methods is by refactoring and re-use. Refactoring can be applied to both the product and process realms. Minimizing the number of components and dependencies and re-using standard components when possible, will reduce the complexity of managing the product configurations. Also before investing in new features or costly changes, assessing your current portfolio and incorporating carry-over and variant management strategies into your development routine and change management processes is advisable. Also, reusability needs to be considered proactively when developing new products. This will help ensure that valuable assets from previous projects are leveraged effectively and efficiently, reducing unnecessary expenses and maximizing resources.

This will however increase the dependencies and requires automation around CM is on the right maturity level.

Conclusion

The lack of focus of many Agile methodologies on Configuration Management practices creates an increased risk of quality escapes. While, in many aspects, CM2 has already shown that it embeds lean and agile thinking. Evaluating CM2 and Agile methodologies can generate opportunities for improvements that further strengthen the ability of an organization to understand critical control points, identify skill gaps, and streamline and develop to innovate its product portfolio and capabilities more efficiently.

Header photo by Jér?me Prax?on?Unsplash

This article was originally published on?mdux.net.?

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