Configuration management is an ongoing process of identifying and managing changes to system configuration during the lifecycle of the project. 

The following are the key activities that are performed during the configuration management process:

• Planning: This step involves planning the scope, identifying the configuration, and the resources, tools, and techniques to set up, test, and manage the configuration data. 
• Setup and testing: This phase usually starts early in the requirement gathering phase and continues until user acceptance testing. In the beginning, a functional consultant in the project usually studies the customer's legacy system and gathers key information such as legal entities, chart of accounts, financial dimension, number sequences, and master and reference data and configures the CRP environment. As the CRP phase continues, the key decision that's made during these phases inspires new and updated configuration. Most of the configuration is finalized once the functional and design documents have been completed; however, configuration updates continue during the development and testing phase of the project to reflect new custom configurations and address quality issues.
• Tracking and controlling change: One of the important aspects of configuration management is to ensure that changes to the configuration are tracked and controlled. Tracking and controlling the configuration data ensures that the system is tested with the same configuration in the different environment during various phases of the implementation project. As an example, configuration usually starts with the CRP environment and then moves to system testing, user acceptance testing (UAT), and finally the production environment. 

In summary, configuration management revolves around identifying and setting up the right configuration and tracking and managing the changes throughout the project. One of the proven techniques you can use to track and control the configuration data is using a golden configuration environment. A golden configuration environment is an environment where are all key system configuration is set up and maintained. All the other environments, such as system testing and the UAT environment, are seeded from the golden configuration environment periodically to ensure that the configurations are tested before they move to production. In the following subsections, we will learn about more key aspects of configuration planning and the golden configuration environment.