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Software release management is changing; moving faster and delivering more, and as a result, I often hear IT managers complain that they “just don’t know.” They are “busy chasing down the teams and the data.” And in the end, they are “Not sure if go-live, is going to go good!”
IT managers have a lot on their plate and they struggle to meet the requirements of their many demand streams with yesterday’s processes. To gain better control of their applications, ongoing projects, releases, technologies and teams, they need a centralized solution that enables them to manage in an efficient and effective way. Ideally, the right solution will help to analyze and take actionable measures to ensure the delivery of current projects; as well as make data-based decisions on delivery timelines for upcoming releases. To do so, IT managers need to extend beyond their current tools of excel sheets and SharePoint to an intelligent solution that offers three key capabilities: visibility, collaboration, and risk reduction.
Visibility to Everything and Everyone for Better Software Release Management
Portfolio and Release management should start with a central repository of all business and IT requirements. Once a central repository is created, managers can begin to control all their demand streams in one place with complete visibility and traceability into assigned projects and scheduled releases. With visibility into the requirements backlog, managers can intelligently dispatch tasks across teams, multiple projects and releases.
They can also begin to manage and monitor investment buckets that are aligned with the overall business strategy. With this form of value stream mapping, all stakeholders have visibility into overall projects, features and requirements that are mapped back to the value provided.
Collaboration Across the Continuous Delivery Tool Chain
Many times, the delivery tool chain can run across a large globally dispersed organization with cross functional teams, creating silos. This can hinder the execution process and cause unwanted delays or even produce the wrong outcomes.
Today, with application change being driven by the business, it is critical that insights into change delivery be continually shared with the business as both the “customer” and a stakeholder in delivery. In the end, the business must sign off that the requirement requested is in line with the delivered product, making them an inherent part of the delivery tool chain.
Additionally, IT teams need to collaborate from the start to ensure the plan, build, verify and release stages are most efficient and effective. With a collaborative solution presenting clear release scope objectives, teams come together to work on the same objectives through connected activities and workflows.
Removing the Risk From Software Releases
When releasing changes to your applications in release waves, IT managers need to continually factor in scope, time and quality. Today’s traditional mix of tools like ALM solutions, excel sheets and SharePoint, make it almost impossible to see the three factors in one place. Often, in order to understand the current situation, managers are chasing after both business and IT teams to gain the information necessary to understand status and quality. And even thereafter, must manually understand where the risk resides.
A solution that can intelligently and automatically factor the three would provide real-time risk analysis of release progress for multiple project waves. With a requirement-centric view, managers gain visibility to completion status across dev and test, quality issues can be detected early, cross project defects can be identified, and test plans can be created at the start and mapped to the specific requirement. This multidimensional view into the impact of change and risk to release provides IT managers with data-based decision making that enables a more proactive approach to delivery.
One solution for Changes and Releases
Today Enterprise IT struggles to meet the demands of business-driven changes with yesterday’s processes. To become more agile, they need a solution that offers visibility and collaboration to the already fragmented software delivery tool chain.
To respond to change faster, IT needs to adopt a new standard for releasing change. They need to adopt an Enterprise Agile Delivery solution, Release Dynamix (RDx). With RDx, IT managers can see release status across the entire delivery lifecycle, sync everyone and align all teams to the same business objectives and continually and intelligently factor scope time and quality for faster and safer releases.
Read how large IT organizations use Enterprise Agile Delivery to release change in a model of continuous delivery.