Release Management and implementing consistent change

In a world where all businesses are increasingly driven by technology and processes that enable business services, the need to get things right and maintain them, is crucial.

Service providers that have successfully aligned their IT infrastructure with their overall business strategy rely on offering consistent and high quality service. Just as the world evolves, so too do business requirements, which means the underpinning infrastructure and processes must adapt. Although this may be viewed with some reluctance, good service management practices can only improve the process of evolution without affecting the quality of service.

Release and Deployment Management falls into the Transition phase of the ITIL v3 best practice service management framework. This process assists service organizations with the evolution of their environment in response to changing business requirements. Logically viewed as an extension of Change Management, Release Management plans and manages the release of new and updated business services to customers, taking into consideration all technical and non-technical elements of a release.

RFC’s and Releases

The ability to properly manage a Release, ensures minimal disruption of services provided without sacrificing service quality, and means all elements of the service organization need to be accessible, understood and communicated. From the moment a Request for Change (RFC) is recorded, the typical release process of assessment, development, testing, deployment, audit, CMDB update and closure needs to be applied consistently, and access across multiple service management processes may be needed.

LiveTime’s implementation of Release and Deployment Management, is provided to all licensed users with Change Management access. Users assigned Release Management are automatically assigned the Deployment Management process due to the varied roles performed by Change, Release and Test managers, which require them to participate in the high level planning of the release and have fine control over the deployment activities. Users assigned Deployment Management do not always require access to Release planning, as they are typically technicians involved in the rollout or physical implementation of the service release.

Role access may also be mixed depending on factors such as the type of package to be implemented, urgency or project business priority. LiveTime allows unlimited Release and Deployment teams and workflows to be configured in the system, each with their own mix of work groups to facilitate the varied applications of Release and Deployment Management.

As Releases can vary in size, risk and touch-points, LiveTime also allows Managers to decide on a per Release basis if the deployment of a Release is to be managed by the Change Management process. If this option is selected, the Release Manager can set the point of the Change Management workflow that Deployment Tasks are created, ready for action. Otherwise, they simply create the Release with the associated Deployment Tasks and when the Release moves to the Deploy State, technicians can action the Tasks.

Process Integration

Consistency of process is achieved by mapping organizations Release procedures to LiveTime’s fully configurable workflows from policy and planning, to design, build and configuration, roll-out planning and testing. Should the need arise to back-out a change related to a release, the CMDB changes can be reverted in a matter of clicks, once the procedural information in the Knowledge base has been followed. This store of information can be extended to include detailed release and build instructions or in the case of things such as install scripts, against specific CIs within the CMDB, for future access.

Using the built-in CMDB, Release Managers have immediate access to the history of all relevant CIs and agreed SLA black out periods when creating a release. Updates to CIs are defined during the Release creation process, and these are applied automatically when Deployment Tasks have been actioned, in readiness to close the Release.

Tight integration between Change, Release, the CMDB, Service Level Agreements and the Knowledge Base in LiveTime, provide Managers with all the information they need when designing and deploying a release. Such control allows service providers to successfully roll out more releases into production, on time, with fewer changes needing to be backed out and fewer incidents being caused by a release.