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What is Release Management (RM)?
Need
to manage release management and want practical standards and best
practices for information management governance and accountability?
Release
management is a key component of the change management
process, which provides a
disciplined process for
introducing changes into the production environment with minimal
disruption to ongoing operations.
What standards and best practices are required?
The
change management process should:
- Plan
production changes resulting
from approved change requests;
- Build effective release
packages for the
deployment of one or many changes into production;
- Test
release
mechanisms to ensure minimum
disruption to the production environment;
- Review
preparation for the release to ensure
maximum successful deployments; and
- Deploy
the
change in line with
structured
implementation guidelines.
What roles
and responsibilities are involved?
- Release
Manager is responsible for
managing the release,
which includes:
- Planning
for the change;
- Ensuring user acceptance
tests have
been completed;
- Verifying training
has
been provided
to the affected user community if needed;
- Validating the back-out
plan;
- Staging the pilot
tests;
and
- Implementing the full
deployment of
the change.
What are the
release process steps?
- Plan
Release. Deploying
a release into the production environment involves risks to the
availability and reliability of that environment.
All
stakeholders need
to be aware of the potential risks involved in the deployment.
Recognizing this, the release manager
should ensure that the
appropriate managers agree on, and sign off on, the release delivery
document before the release moves into the design and build phase.
The objective of this process step is
to complete a release
delivery
plan that will identify:
- Release objectives;
- Roles and responsibilities;
- Tasks and activities;
- Deliverables;
- Communication and training plans; and
- Release schedule
- Build
Release. The
objective of this task is to identify and develop the processes, tools,
and technologies required to deploy the release. The release build
process:
- Selects a suitable release
mechanism
for the change that is a strategic fit, is repeatable, and is
consistent;
- Designs and builds a release
package for the
change that allows it to be successfully deployed;
- Tests
that the release package delivers the
change effectively in line with requirements; and
- Updates the configuration
item control database
with appropriate release documentation.
- Test
Release. The
acceptance testing
process:
- Tests
the
release process to ensure
that all components can be migrated correctly;
- Tests the
user
functionality to ensure that the release meets user
specified
requirements;
- Performs controlled pilot testing
in the
production environment where necessary; and
- Evaluates acceptance-testing
results to make a
confident decision to move toward release preparation.
- Prepare
Release. The
release preparation process:
- Ensures that adequate resources are
available for deployment of the release;
- Ensures that release communications
plans have
been executed;
- Ensures all training
has been completed;
- Confirms the production environment
readiness
for receiving the release;
- Reviews the preparation of the release for
deployment
into the production environment; and
- Ensures the change
management process has
handled all related changes.
- Deploy
Release. The
deployment process involves the
physical migration
of objects
into the production environment using the procedures defined in the
Release Package.
Deployment
should only occur if the
CMT authorizes
Readiness.
Summary...
Release management provides a
disciplined process for releasing
changes into the production environment with minimal disruption to
ongoing operations.
It is critical that a release plan be
created and adopted by all information management projects.
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