Mastering Release Management: Strategies for Seamless Deployment

Project Management primarily focuses on orchestrating resources to deploy significant Releases within projected cost, time, and quality estimates.
Release Management, on the other hand, is chiefly concerned with guiding changes through various pre-production environments until they are smoothly deployed into the production IT environment with minimal disruption. Release activities encompass planning, design, configuration, rollout planning, testing, communication, and deployment. It consolidates a series of changes into a cohesive collection called a release, based on shared characteristics of the changes. Release management enhances the predictability and proactive nature of the change management process, vital for handling the volume of interconnected change within an organization.

Pre-production environments, such as development, system testing, integration testing, performance testing, and user acceptance testing, lie beyond the formal change management controls of IT Operations. Given the rapid pace at which these environments evolve during build and test phases, it's crucial to strike a balance between agility, flexibility, and control.
Typically, these pre-production environments are managed according to the approach chosen by either the Project Manager or the Release Manager. Although Project Managers may occasionally undertake this function, their primary focus tends to be on overarching project aspects rather than day-to-day technical matters.
Plutora Release Management offers Project Managers and Release Managers a cloud-based tool to plan, execute, and coordinate releases across intricate, interdependent applications.