SNESCM

Scandinavian Network of Excellence
in
Software Configuration Management

Presentation abstracts:

A Day in the Life of an SCM Person (Bolette Garmin):
Working as a configuration Manager is in many cases a job as a salesman just as much as a job as the one having the responsibility to keep track on CIs, changes, standards and tools.
In many companies the value and extend of work involved in implementing configuration Management is not completely understood by senior IT management, just because they have choosen to hire a configuration manager. A lot of lobbying on all levels of management to understand why it is important to invest in both tools and processes is needed to make configuration management work in all the companies where I have been employed.
In other words; the perfect configuration manager is a mix of the most smooth talking diplomat and the most techie nerd, a very rare combination.

Continuous Delivery (Peter Walls):
In this presentation the principles behind Continuous Delivery (CD) are presented. Using CD we can speed up the pace and deliver more often, with higher quality and without needing more resources. All with control and traceability. What more can a Configuration Manager wish for?

CM for Globally distributed Software Development (Lars Bendix):
Distributed projects are generally recognized as being more complex and adding a number of new challenges to project management. Configuration management (CM) can be considered the infrastructure of all types of project being they co-located or distributed and lack of CM or badly implemented CM will hurt any type of project. In this paper, we take a closer look at the role of CM in distributed projects - where can standard CM techniques help, how can they be implemented, and what special challenges does distribution pose. We do that by looking at general and CM-specific challenges from literature on global software development and discuss those in the light of our experience as CM practitioners on different distributed industrial projects. The result is a list of challenges that CM techniques can solve, challenges where CM has to be implemented differently on distributed project, and challenges that are still challenges to CM.

SCM = Supply Chain Management? (Jan Magnusson):
This is the definition of Logistics Management adopted by the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals: "Logistics Management is that part of Supply Chain Management that plans, implements, and controls the efficient, effective forward and reverse flow and storage of goods, services and related information between the point of origin and the point of consumption in order to meet customers' requirements."
From the Bylaws of Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals.

Challenges building a virtual CM organization (Ulf Asklund):
This presentation is a mix of theoretical reasoning and experiences from our current work at Sony Mobile Communications. The topic is how to best organize CM persons and roles in an organization, i.e. how to both create a critical mass of skilled persons deciding what to do and how, covering the entire company and product lifecycle, and also make sure decided rules and guidelines are followed and executed in an efficient way.
In the presentation, I will address the problem of how to organize and drive the CM work in order to create one CM strategy covering CM requirements and activities throughout an organization and the entire product lifecycle. It covers questions like: How do we organize our CM persons? Should we create a specific CM line organization from which project request resources or do we need CM persons to belong in many line organizations? Should a global organization cover all CM roles needed throughout the product life cycle, i.e. CM for hw, sw, services, customer services, manufacturing, etc? How to create good CM governance in an organization and secure correct level of CM throughout the entire product lifecycle? How should proper Configuration Management be secured in an organization? How do we know if we have the correct level of CM activities overall? How do we know if we have a good "chain" of CM activities in which also the weakest link is strong enough?
Sony Mobile Communications is a big company with a strong focus on CM, but even in many smaller companies CM competence is often spread out on many persons and might need to be organized and coordinated in a more structured way.