ITIL Change management and release management workflows are separate due to its complexity. Deployment to production happens after completing the final release. Manage development, test and production environments individually to mitigate risk. However, testing happens at every stage and requires approval to push every release.
Set clear roles for Change and Release manager — Share a detailed documentation with assessment criteria, CAB process guidelines and mutual responsibilities. Ensure Information consistency — Release planning is a part of change evaluation and includes information about build plan, test plan and release schedule.
Involve release team members — Include release management team as a part of CAB. This helps CAB to know the right information about the planned release. Change takes care of the Post Implementation Review PIR but involve release team members as well who are responsible for the actual implementation.
Higher the complexity of change, longer the time it takes for review. Consolidate scheduling — Merge your forward change schedule with release schedule to follow a holistic approach. Prioritize releases and fix the schedule accordingly. This may include any emergency change or urgent customer commitment. Integrate Project management with Release management — Project management enables release team to plan and deploy releases effectively through better collaboration among project members and staying up to date with the progress across the team.
Releases are broken down into different projects. Create multiple tasks and assign to every team member for proper allocation. This blended approach enables businesses to follow a DevOps philosophy in managing deployments efficiently. Let us not follow processes blindly rather understand and adapt them based on our business model. Release Management is more technical than Change.
If done well, both processes will avoid unnecessary levels of bureaucracy and will build a collection of change and release models that pre-define and pre-approve the rigor required based on levels of risk. The more mature the processes, the higher number of standard changes. Approaches such as Agile and DevOps help to limit over processing while improving the flow of all changes from concept to operation.
Remember, that Change and Release Management are only processes — on their own they do nothing — they must be executed by people. Each change will either be unique or fall within the bounds of an existing change model. Releases emanating out of the project can be handled singularly, sequentially or packaged together when it makes sense. See more blogs about this. Post a Comment. Wise May 05, I was recently asked to clarify the roles of the Process Owner, Process Manager and Process Practitioner and wanted to share this with you.
They are the goto person and represent this process across the entire organization. They will ensure that the process is clearly defined, designed and documented.
They will ensure that the process has a set of Policies for governance. Example: The process owner for Incident management will ensure that all of the activities to Identify, Record, Categorize, Investigate, … all the way to closing the incident are defined and documented with clearly defined roles, responsibilities, handoffs, and deliverables. Policies are rules that govern the process. Efficient change management effectively leads to more informed developers and IT professionals who can continue to work within a changing system and deliver customer value.
Change for the sake of change just causes confusion. Reliability and a stable process are core components of a traditional IT operations team. So, make sure you show how and why the change creates a positive impact on the overall business. Then, do a cost-benefit analysis to determine if the costs of a change are worth the benefits to be reaped. Are you losing internal productivity due to changes? Will you gain more new business based on the changes? In a world of continuous change, the only thing you can plan for is change.
Detailed monitoring and alerting across the entire release management process can help you develop a proactive incident response strategy. So, when things go wrong in production, DevOps and IT teams are equipped with the context and tools they need to quickly remediate problems. The only way to ensure service reliability in a changing world is by preparing yourself for the scenarios when a change has negative consequences. Constant change depends on effective communication at all times.
From product development planning to when you deploy code to production, the development and IT teams need to work collaboratively. With greater visibility across all development and release workflows, as well as processes and tools for real-time collaboration , DevOps-forward organizations can fix issues faster and continue to deliver customer value at a high velocity.
Last but not least, tracking and reporting of incident management KPIs and essential release management metrics can help you improve the way you change in the future. You can use the information to update on-call rotations or change the typical release cadence in a way that makes sense for your team.
Software engineering and IT operations organizations are learning to work closely throughout the entire release management and development lifecycle to deploy reliable applications and services faster. By shifting testing and IT involvement left into the development lifecycle and giving developers more exposure to production environments, the business is improving its ability to resolve incidents quickly AND deploy new features. A culture of DevOps collaboration and transparency is leading to better relationships between IT and software developers and helping businesses use their engineering org as a competitive differentiator.
Change management and release management work hand in hand to help developers, IT operations and security professionals get comfortable with ambiguity and rapid change.
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