- The business demands high service and IT needs to respond. Rapid customer response through efficient release and deployment is critical to maintain high business satisfaction.
- The lack of process ownership leads to chaotic and uncoordinated releases, resulting in costly rework and poor hand-offs.
- IT emphasizes tools but release tools and technologies alone will not fix the problem. Tools are integrated into the processes they support – if the process challenges aren’t addressed first, then the tool won’t help.
- Releases are traditionally executed in silos with limited communication across the entire release pipeline. Culturally, there is little motivation for cross-functional collaboration and holistic process optimization.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Release management is not solely driven by tools. It is about delivering high quality releases on time through accountability and governance aided by the support of tools.
- Release management is independent of your software development lifecycle (SDLC). Release management practices sit as an agnostic umbrella over your chosen development methodology.
- Ownership of the entire process is vital. Release managers ensure standards are upheld and the pipeline operates efficiently.
Impact and Result
- Acquire release management ownership. Ensure there is appropriate accountability for speed and quality of the releases passing through the entire pipeline. A release manager has oversight over the entire release process and facilitates the necessary communication between business stakeholders and various IT roles.
- Instill holistic thinking. Release management includes all steps required to push release and change requests to production along with the hand-off to Operations and Support. Increase the transparency and visibility of the entire pipeline to ensure local optimizations do not generate bottlenecks in other areas.
- Standardize and lay a strong release management foundation. Optimize the key areas where you are experiencing the most pain and continually improve.