Release management

The challenge

• You want to do your releases in a controlled way.
• You want to increase the collaboration between your teams.
• You want to automate releases to avoid the pitfalls of manual work that incurs costs to the business.

Our advice

Insight

• Manage your risk: Release management will stabilize your IT environment and the service o the clients. A poorly designed release will disrupt the service with revenue repercussions to your company. Rushing a release puts stress on the teams and poses an increased risk to your business.
• High-quality standardized processes are critical. A standardized process allows your teams to focus on the functional deliverables and less on a release's technicalities. It reduces costly downtimes in the chain.
• The business owns the process. Release managers should report into the business lines to remain good stewards of the service chains.

Impact and results 

• Prepare a release management policy. This policy must include both regular releases and patches. Vulnerabilities follow each other quickly, and teams need to be ready to react fast. Determine the logistics of a release beforehand so that when the time comes, groups can act effectively.
• Automate. Automate. Automate your software deployment and patch processes. Manual deployments are the enemy of efficacity and are prone to errors. Various tools will deploy and patch automatically and in a controlled way across multiple environments.
• Automation can make things go wrong fast—test deployments before releasing them in production and monitor your releases. Larger organizations have separate test environments, but if you cannot afford that, roll out patches and releases gradually. Closely monitor their performance. In case of issues, rollback.

The roadmap

Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:

Start here.

We have four ways we can help you with improving or implementing release management in your organization. Read up here on the why and how to increase the quality of your releases and deployments.

• Stabilize Release and Deployment Management – Executive Brief (ppt)

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• Stabilize Release and Deployment Management – Phases 1-4 (ppt)

Analyze your current state

Understand first how your current process functions. Gain a solid understanding of the embedded core processes at work in your organization.

• Stabilize Release and Deployment Management – Phase 1: Analyze Current State (ppt)
• Release Management Maturity Assessment (xls)
• Release Management Project Roadmap Tool (xls)
• Release Management Workflow Library (multi-file)
• Release Management Standard Operating Procedure (doc)
• Patch Management Policy (doc)
• Release Management Policy (doc)
• Release Management Deployment Tracker (xls)
• Release Management Build Procedure Template (xls)

Plan your releases and deployments

Plan your release: chain-based, atomic, independent, or as a release train

• Stabilize Release and Deployment Management – Phase 2: Release and Deployment Planning (ppt)

Build, test, and deploy.

Look at releases holistically and take a comprehensive approach. Build effective release designs. Get it right the first time. 

• Stabilize Release and Deployment Management – Phase 3: Build, Test, Deploy (ppt).

Measure effectiveness, manage, and improve where needed. 

Clearly define your end state and your desired goals. Realize both IT and business benefits.

• Stabilize Release and Deployment Management – Phase 4: Measure, Manage, Improve (ppt)