4 Best Practices that Define Enterprise Release Management

Enterprise Release Management (ERM) is an emerging set of practices designed to support enterprise change initiatives and software delivery across multiple projects within large organizations.ERM is the management of the software delivery lifecycle across multiple projects and departments within a large organization – the orchestration of activities and resources across multiple, interdependent software releases and change initiatives. All in order to deliver software at scale while managing both the technical and organizational complications that accompany delivering changes to enterprise-scale, composite systems within a large organization.

Best Practices that Define Enterprise Release Management

Enterprise release management is a practice area that covers a wide array of activities all focused on delivering software, but it is defined by a set of practices that support a multi-project, cross-functional approach to managing the end-to-end release process.

When pursuing effective enterprise release management, pay close attention to ensure the operational health of these four key best practices:

1.  Multi-project Release Coordination

Maintaining a consolidated event calendar across all projects included in a large, composite release. This includes the orchestrated deployment of these projects to applications in the enterprise operating environment.

2.  Environment Management

Tracking capacity requirements and work-effort for environments required during the software delivery process. Support decisions regarding the use of automated provisioning of environments or scheduled use of shared persistent environments.

3.  Automated Release Reporting

Capturing metrics and key performance indicators for all release-related processes, gates and resources, presented in dashboards for all stakeholders to identify progress toward the enterprise release.

4.  Continuous Process Improvement

Measuring release-related metrics and tracking progress across the end-to-end software delivery process to support an iterative approach to process improvement.

The four practices outlined above define enterprise release management and should all be organized at a strategic, portfolio-wide level to provide IT management with visibility into the more tactical processes that serve to support coordinated releases.  As organizations adopt a more agile and accelerated approach to software delivery with an emphasis on best practices at a tactical level, release management provides a series of practices designed to foster and support this agility and align it with decision-makers responsible for entire portfolios.Why does this all matter?

• ERM is the missing link. Many VPs look to project-level release managers for enterprise-wide plans.  This doesn't scale - enterprise releases need to be managed at a higher level.

• Organizations that don't take time to plan for non-production capacity requirements run the risk of making entire teams or departments wait when timelines invariably slip.

• As DevOps continues to transform the enterprise it creates pressure on management to measure status without interrupting teams.