Many IT organizations have implemented some form of Change Management but fewer have implemented a formal release management process successfully. Yet, most incidents are caused by poorly planned and/or tested releases. Why? Because several prerequisites to a sound release management program have not been addressed.

Here are a few:

1. Develop a clear set of expectations with application development organization on timing, lead times, risk, end-user training and infrastructure readiness state, ensuring smooth, planned launches. It is quite impossible to have effective releases of applications without a cooperative effort between infrastructure and application development. Even with the onslaught (or rebirth) of Agile application development processes, this cooperation must be in place to ensure quality services.
2. Use one enterprise change management process for change planning and approval, which begins at the front end of the demand funnel?so all of IT works with one change planning system?Plan, Approve, Build and Implement. This allows application development and infrastructure management to weigh in on risk, impact and cost?thereby getting a true picture of the value of a proposed activity. This can be the portfolio management tool or the IT change management tool, it doesn?t matter?but use one for IT. This also allows infrastructure to understand the demand load they are facing in time to affect their strategic planning. So better decisions/tradeoffs can be made on infrastructure investments. Most organizations have Change Control (focused only on the recording and approving of a change and not the planning and performing) and not Change Management. Most change management systems remain in Silos either in infrastructure or selective domains of infrastructure.
3. Implement enterprise configuration management processes and a configuration management database “CMDB” that supports enterprise discovery and application management and is linked to incident, problem, change and release management as well as links to the Definitive Software Library (DSL) and Definitive Hardware Library (DHL). It should support reconciliation of all CIs and their attributes and must be able to federate CI attributes from various data sources linked to a specific CI. This level of information will be critical in understanding the risk and impact of changes and releases and will be invaluable in supporting both processes in planning and implementing approved changes and releases.
4. Have agreed-upon (and followed) release management policy?with the correct amount of emphasis on testing for quality, end-user testing and end-user training. As a part of the policies, have a defined set of change execution models for the four to five common types of releases agreed upon with the application development organization.

Bottom line! Beyond enterprise change and configuration management, have the infrastructure and application organizations joined at the hip in the development of the Release Management process.

Also, check out our free Change Management Manual.

Don’t forget to register for Evergreen’s change management webinar: Take Change Management from Firefighting to Fire Prevention

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