The Link Between Change Management and Release Management

Release Management

Release Management (RM) is primarily concerned with the flow of changes through various pre-production environments culminating in successfully deployment into the production IT environment in the least disruptive manner. It groups a series of changes into a collection known as a release, which is based on defined common characteristics of the changes. Release management makes the change management process more proactive and predictable and is essential to manage the volume of interdependent change within an organization.

Release management makes the change management process more proactive and predictable and is essential to manage the volume of interdependent change within an organization.

Pre-production environments like development, system testing, integration testing, performance testing and user acceptance testing, fall outside the formal change management controls of IT Operations. Given the velocity at which these environments change during build and test an appropriate balance needs to be found between agility, flexibility and control.

These pre-production environments are normally managed according to the approach selected by the Project Manager or Release Manager. Although Project Managers sometimes perform this function they are generally more concerned with high-level aspects of the project rather than the technical day-to-day aspects.

Change Management vs Release Management, Visually

The starkest differences between change management and release management stem from the fact that, while the former resides on the strategic level, the latter resides on the operational level. So, while change management is more of a gatekeeper, or an authorization process—since one of its goals is to protect the production environment—release management is more of a doer. In other words, it’s the implementation process, the one that gets things done.

The following table summarizes, in a visual way, the main differences between these two related processes.

Change ManagementRelease Management

• Ensures  the production environment is protected while assessing the release plan

• Builds, tests, and deploys the changes

• Consists of activities that happen before and after deployment

• Consists of deploy activities

• Consists of an authorization process

• Consists of an implementation process

• Not every change causes a release

• A release can involve from one to several changes

• Lives on the Strategic level

• Lives on the Operational level

• Adopts Post Implementation Review processes

• Uses version control tools

Plutora Release Management

Plutora provides a cloud based Release Management tool that enables you to plan, execute and coordinate releases across complex interdependent applications. Plutora also allows you to manage environments allocation to phases within a release, providing better visibility and control for efficient environment utilization.