Configuration management is a systems engineering process for establishing consistency of a product's attributes throughout its life. In the technology world, configuration management is an IT management process that tracks individual configuration items of an IT system.

Configuration management of information systems involves a set of activities that can be organized into four major phases – Planning, Identifying and Implementing Configurations, Monitoring, and Controlling Configuration Changes.

The software configuration management process identifies the functional and physical attributes of software at critical points in time, and implements procedures to control changes to an identified attribute with the objective of maintaining software integrity and traceability throughout the software life cycle.

Configuration management ensures that there is a process in place to handle changes to the product's specification, while also documenting how you will monitor and control those changes. The configuration management plan helps with the version control of the product.