How to deliver?

I had an opportunity to be an advisor to my friend in making selection of the his brand new car.

So visited a car show room with prior appointment, sat down in the cozy place to talk about cars. I was wondering why we are not been taken around to show some cars to make a choice, instead we started starring at big screen .

At the start we had presentation on the technology , features and pricing model. Next step was to select the interior, colour of the car etc. Finally we saw the computer generated model of the car. with more changes we settled on the specs and started discussion on the Price tag , delivery date etc.

By now, you must have realised that the car salesman has captured our requirements in details , which are fed in to the configuration management tool , there by feed into the production system and so on. The user specs are now frozen will not be changed unless the request is made for a change .

Configuration management plays vital role in the product delivery in any scenario .

Quality review and and audits will depend upon the configuration management to identify the correct level of the product versions for the quality review or the final delivery. Smart vendors use some part of the configuration management tool to capture the customer requirement as mentioned above .

Borland's Star team or Dimention or Source safe are most popular configuration management tools used in the industry.

http://www.configurationkit.com/
http://www.borland.com/us/products/starteam/index.html

Kaizen, Lean or any other method you follow in manufacturing industry or in the software industry product delivery is heavy dependant on the configuration management to ensure correct product delivery.