The Quiet Configuration Crisis: Australia’s Shrinking CM Workforce
Configuration Management is one of those disciplines that only attracts attention when it fails. When it works, delivery stays on track, audits pass quietly, and engineering teams move forward with confidence. When it doesn’t, the symptoms are everywhere, but the cause is rarely named.
Across Australia, we are facing a growing Configuration Management capability risk. Not because organisations do not value CM, but because the workforce that carries this knowledge is ageing, and almost no effort is being made to replace it.
An ageing workforce with no replacement pipeline
Most Configuration Management practitioners in Australia did not begin their careers in CM. They migrated into it from engineering, logistics, quality, or project roles, often late in their careers. I’ve certainly never met anyone that wanted to “do CM” when they grew up. As a result, CM teams are disproportionately made up of senior practitioners.
At the same time:
CM is rarely (never) taught as a standalone discipline in TAFE or university
Graduate and early career CM roles are uncommon
Formal training pathways are limited and inconsistent
Organisations rely on conversion rather than development.
CM isn’t a ‘sexy’ career path
The outcome is simple and predictable. As senior practitioners retire, the capability is not being replaced.
Why Configuration Management is Uniquely Vulnerable
Many leaders assume CM capability can be backfilled quickly. It’s an understandable assumption, but it’s incorrect.
Configuration Management is not primarily procedural knowledge, it’s experiential. While policies, standards, and work instructions define what should occur, effective Configuration Management depends on judgement developed through repeated exposure to real delivery conditions. Practitioners learn by navigating imperfect data, contested change decisions, incomplete baselines, audit scrutiny, and the downstream consequences of early configuration mistakes.
This experience builds an understanding of risk, timing, and impact that cannot be captured in procedures or tools. As a result, CM capability resides as much in the practitioner’s decision making and intuition as it does in documented process.
The capability cliff no one is planning for
Many organisations appear stable right up until the point they are not. For long periods, experienced CM practitioners absorb risk without drawing attention to it. They compensate for unclear role boundaries, immature toolchains, inconsistent governance, and incomplete artefacts through judgement and experience. Issues are resolved early, decisions are contextualised, and delivery continues with minimal disruption.
This creates the impression that the system itself is robust. In reality, the apparent stability is often sustained by a small number of individuals rather than by resilient structures.
As senior partitioners approach retirement, this hidden dependency becomes exposed.
This results in partial knowledge transfer, informal succession planning, and an underestimated depth of judgement. As retirements in the industry accelerate, organisations are facing a capability cliff, rather than a gradual decline.
In this environment:
Junior staff are required to make configuration decisions with long-term impact before they have been exposed to the consequences of similar decisions
Engineers absorb CM responsibilities informally, applying them inconsistently alongside their primary technical roles
Baseline integrity degrades incrementally as undocumented assumptions and workarounds accumulate
Audit findings increase, often without a clear or singular root cause
Rework and schedule pressure emerge downstream, disconnected from the original configuration decisions that caused them
Because these effects manifest slowly and indirectly, they are frequently attributed to broader delivery or engineering challenges rather than to CM capability loss.
Recovery from this point is neither quick nor simple. Even with deliberate investment, rebuilding lost Configuration Management maturity typically takes five to ten years. By the time the problem is clearly recognised, the expertise required to address it has already left the organisation.
The solution is rarely ‘more people’
Requests for additional Configuration Management headcount are rarely compelling in isolation. Framed this way, the issue is easily interpreted as a local resourcing problem rather than a systemic risk. The underlying challenge is not the number of Configuration Managers, but the continuity of CM capability over time.
In the absence of deliberate action, many organisations are implicitly relying on a set of untested assumptions to sustain this capability:
That senior practitioners will delay retirement or remain available longer than planned
That informal knowledge transfer, mentoring, or shadowing will capture sufficient judgement and context
That engineers can absorb Configuration Management responsibilities alongside their primary technical roles without affecting delivery quality or consistency
That compliance, audit, and assurance risk will remain manageable despite declining experience depth
These assumptions often go unchallenged because they appear to hold in the short term. Experienced practitioners continue to compensate quietly, delivery pressure takes precedence, and the system appears to function.
However, assumptions are not strategies. When they fail, they fail abruptly. By that point, organisations are no longer managing a resourcing issue. They are responding to a governance and delivery risk that is costly to unwind and slow to recover from.
How Organisations can Begin to Close the Gap
A small but growing number of organisations are starting to address this risk by treating Configuration Management as a professional discipline in its own right, rather than as a secondary or transitional skillset. It’s a subtle shift, but an important one. It reframes CM from something that happens incidentally to something that is developed deliberately.
More resilient approaches share several common characteristics.
First, CM roles are defined explicitly across career stages. Early-career and associate positions are established with clear expectations, boundaries, and development pathways, rather than relying on late-career conversion into CM roles. This creates a visible entry point into the discipline and allows experience to accumulate over time.
Second, capability transfer is structured rather than incidental. Junior practitioners are deliberately paired with experienced Configuration Managers, with time and responsibility allocated for mentoring, decision support, and exposure to complex scenarios. Knowledge transfer is treated as part of the role, not as an optional activity squeezed in alongside delivery pressure.
Third, organisations place greater emphasis on documenting configuration decision rationale, not just outcomes. Capturing why a decision was made, what alternatives were considered, and what risks were accepted preserves context that would otherwise be lost when individuals move on. Over time, this builds organisational memory rather than individual dependency.
Fourth, CM capability is treated as a governance asset rather than an overhead function. Its contribution to delivery confidence, audit readiness, and risk reduction is recognised explicitly, which makes investment in capability development easier to justify and sustain.
Finally, Configuration Management development is integrated into broader engineering and delivery capability planning. CM is considered alongside other professional disciplines when planning workforce composition, succession, and long-term program support, rather than being addressed reactively when issues arise.
None of these actions require immediate or large-scale workforce expansion. What they require is intent, visibility, and leadership recognition that Configuration Management capability does not sustain itself by default.
The cost of doing nothing
The most significant risk associated with Configuration Management workforce decline is that it rarely announces itself. There is no single failure event and no obvious point of collapse. Instead, capability diminishes quietly, masked by workarounds, individual effort, and short-term delivery pressure.
By the time the impact becomes clear, the expertise required to correct it has already left the organisation. What remains are processes and tools that appear intact but lack the experience and judgement necessary to apply them effectively. Configuration Management continues to exist in form, while its function is steadily weakened.
CM does not fail suddenly. It erodes. Trust in the configuration state declines incrementally as context is lost, decisions become harder to defend, and inconsistencies accumulate. Eventually, delivery teams no longer have confidence in the information that underpins their work. At that point, recovery is no longer preventative. It is reactive, costly, and disruptive.
This outcome is not inevitable. Organisations that treat Configuration Management workforce sustainability as a strategic concern, rather than an operational inconvenience, are far better positioned to maintain delivery confidence over the long term. The question is not whether CM capability will change as the workforce ages, but whether that change will be managed deliberately or allowed to occur by default.
That choice will shape delivery outcomes for years to come.
About Baseline
Baseline exists to professionalise Configuration Management and make its value explicit. Not as an afterthought, and not as a clerical function, but as a strategic capability that underpins delivery confidence.