From my past experiences, Release Management is not always a very popular subject in your typical IT department. Either it is something that was shelved for awhile or there is no formal Release Management plan in place. In contrast, I found that a lot of organisations do have some form of Change Management (often called something else) in place and often the two processes overlap and are considered to be the same thing. Now if you ask me, I find Release Management is as important as any of the ITIL processes that normally take place in the IT lifecycle of an enterprise. The importance for a sound Release Management plan is quite obvious if we look at the challenges that organisations are facing when deploying or upgrading applications, hardware components, critical software updates and rollout of patches, without disrupting mission critical services.

Surprisingly, the Release Management discipline is lacking from comprehensive tools that would help automate the process. However, I found that there is a fair amount of documentation about what the process is and what it should look like conceptually. I have also found that ITIL books and publications that contain details about Release Management can be quite "heavy" to digest and IT organizations are not too keen implementing the "best practices". Implementing ITIL is not a trivial task. It involves changing the way people work and behaviours across the organization, hence implementing it can have its own challenges.

Now, solving the challenges that I have talked about is going to take more than this article but why not look at it from a different perspective? Let's look at the Release Management fundamentals:

What is Release Management?

"The Release Management service management function (SMF) is responsible for deploying changes into an information technology (IT) environment. Once one or more changes are developed, tested, and packaged into releases for deployment, release management is responsible for introducing these changes and managing their release." Reference: Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF)

What are the benefits of Release Management?

The benefits are the ability to achieve successful deployments of changes (software, hardware) in the Production environment without disrupting mission critical services. How can this be achieved?

• Planning the releases in conjunction with the requirements that have been approved through the Change Management process
• Building effective release packages that will be deployed to Production
• Test the release process to ensure that there will be minimum disruption to the Production environment and eliminate major risk factors
• Review preparation for the release to ensure that you will have successful deployments
• Deploy the release as defined in the implementation guidelines

What are the main components of Release Management?

• People
• Roles
• Documents
• Services
• Workflow
• Software packages
• Hardware components

Why not make life easier and look at Release Management as a Business Process? We clearly have a "business case" with pain points, we have a clear idea of what the benefits and goals are, and we know what the components of Release Management are. This is when I usually get some attention from the people that I am presenting it to. I found that once you start abstracting it from ITIL processes as a whole and start positioning it a bit differently, obtaining the buy-in to formalize Release Management becomes a somewhat easier task.