Effective configuration management is critical for maintaining system stability, enabling collaboration, and supporting scalable development practices. By proactively planning changes, tracking and documenting configuration updates, fostering clear communication and establishing robust validation processes, teams can reduce risk, prevent unintended impacts across workstreams and ensure consistent, reliable deployments. The following best practices provide guidance on how to manage configuration effectively while leveraging tools like DevOps and the Import/Export utility.

Proactive Planning & Design 

Implement regular and appropriate ceremonies to review the backlog and identify shared/common configuration that is used by/could impact other workstreams. Changes to shared/common configuration should be reviewed before implementation to understand their impact on shared configurations. By having a forum to identify and recognise these elements it provides awareness across teams/pods and enables proactive management of configuration, testing and ultimately deployments. 

Establish a Design Authority or cross-team/pod review process, this group should be responsible for governing common elements of the system. Design authorities can meet based upon the requirements of your organisation – for larger/multi workstream projects this may be every two weeks to avoid any delays in decision making.

Configuration Governance & DevOps

Using DevOps (or an alternative) for workload/backlog management and tracking means leveraging DevOps platforms and practices to plan, prioritise, assign, and monitor work across teams.

Why Use DevOps?

Here’s how we recommend leveraging it and why it’s valuable:

Centralised Backlog Management

DevOps tools like Azure DevOps or Jira allow teams to:

• Capture requirements (epics, features, user stories)
• Log bugs and blockers
• Prioritise work based on business value
• Maintain a single source of truth
• Provide visibility across teams/stakeholders

Workload Allocation & Capacity Planning

DevOps boards help scrum masters/project managers:

• Ensure only work that is ready is worked on
• Assign work to team members
• Track individual and team capacity
• Balance workloads across sprints
• Identify bottlenecks early
• You can clearly see what is in progress vs. completed

Traceability from Idea to Deployment

One major advantage of using DevOps tools is traceability, this improves:

• Accountability
• Auditability
• Change management
• Reporting

How to Leverage DevOps for Clio Operate Projects

We recommend extending the information captured within DevOps PBIs/user stories to better document, identify and manage configuration changes. 

Shared Config Marker

We recommend implementing a ‘Shared Config’ toggle on PBIs/user stories, to prompt recognition of shared/common configuration and clearly flag changes that may impact other workstreams, and increase visibility of cross-stream dependencies and reduce unintended impact

Configuration Capture

We recommend implementing a dedicated ‘Configuration’ page on PBIs/user stories to track and document configuration changes in a structured way and ensure all relevant items are identified for inclusion in export packages, ultimately reducing the risk of missing components during export package builds. 

The Configuration tab is a custom page to capture ‘what’ has been created/amended in modeller in
relation to that PBI/user story/defect​, the information in this tab is used to build the export pack; so it is critical that it is completed fully and accurately​.

To aid the person using the detail to build the export pack, best practice is to include both the friendly
name and the system name.

Release Information

We recommend implementing a dedicated ‘Release’ page on PBIs/user stories to track which environments the configuration needs to be/has been deployed it (if relevant), as well as to capture any environment-specific steps, release notes that can be published to users as part of the change management process, and ultimately improve deployment accuracy and reduce release risks.

The Release tab is a custom page to capture details of the release/s to the ‘next’ environment e.g. QA, UAT, and can be as simple or complex as the need requires.

The Release Notes and Release Instructions should be completed by the person assigned to the PBI/user story/defect, and specify any instructions on manual steps needed when deploying. The release details section is updated by the individual responsible for deployments, and used to track and manage what has been deployed, where and when.

Deployments & Release Management

The purpose of well-defined and governed deployments and release management is to ensure that software changes are delivered to production in a controlled, reliable, secure, and auditable manner while minimising business risk and operational impact.

A structured deployment and release process helps:

• Prevent failed or unstable releases
• Reduce outages and service disruptions
• Ensure proper testing and validation before go-live

Governance will often include approval gates, change controls, and risk assessments before deployments are made to target environments; different target environments may require different governance, based on the potential risk and impact, i.e. deployments to a production environment will invariably be higher risk and require stronger controls.

Having defined processes ensure:

• Consistent deployment methods
• Environment standardisation (dev, test, UAT, prod)
• Repeatable and automated releases
• Reduced risk of human error
• Clear ownership of changes
• Documented deployments
• Traceability from requirement to deployment

Release management allows organisations to:

• Plan releases aligned with business priorities
• Coordinate across teams and stakeholders
• Communicate release schedules clearly
• Avoid last-minute surprises

We recommend there is a ‘lead’ person/team responsible for preparing, managing and executing deployments, including creation of the config export package, import of export packages and any post import activities.

We also recommend utilising the Maintenance Mode feature when executing deployments. Maintenance mode allows the system to be locked down to specific users when performing system maintenance, such as upgrades or an import of a configuration package. See more information about Maintenance Mode.