How to Make Your Release Management Successful
Release Management is as important as any of the ITIL processes that normally take place in the IT Lifecycle of an enterprise. The importance of a sound Release Management plan is quite obvious if we look at the challenges that organizations are facing when deploying or upgrading applications, hardware components. The key objective is to protect the live environment whilst enabling changes and enhancements to be implemented in a controlled manner, in order to minimize the risk of business process interruptions associated with system changes that have been poorly planned or insufficiently tested.
For a successful release management, it is important to create a release strategy as this defines the roles and responsibilities required. In practice, each project within the release needs to manage its own delivery up to the end of the realisation phase, while activities during the final preparation phase can be managed at the release level. All projects and work packages within the release must deliver each phase within the timescales dictated by the release schedule.
Development object reviews across all work packages within the release at the end of the design phase are essential for early identification of areas of potential conflict between the work packages within the release. While testing readiness is imperative as all projects and work packages within the release, the testing of individual work packages should not commence if elements of the release are missing. Careful control over the migration of configuration and development into the test and production environments are imperative to minimize conflicts between the different work packages within the release.
In any IT organization with various hardware and software assets, changes result in the releases of modified and enhanced versions of hardware and software. Look for a service provider with these Release Management processes
- Planning deployment of software or hardware
- Designing and implementation of procedures for distribution and installation of changes to IT systems
- Protection of production environments from disruption
- Enabling holding of Requirements Management Tool and Test Management Issues together in the context of each Release
- Creating a publish quality Release Note to show all the new enhancements- Requirements, Issues and bug fixes included.
With an effective Release Management process, an enterprise can oversee development, testing, deployment and support of software releases. The release management process that you opt for must combine detailed technical knowledge of the software development life cycle (SDLC) and IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) implementation practices with traditional project management.
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