The link between Project Management and Release Management

Project Management

Project Management and Release Management are two related functions within organizations that work hand in hand to deliver changes to stakeholders. At a high level, Project Management is focused on the delivery of projects (which may or may not result in a release) within a defined scope, budget and timeframe. Project Management activities include project initiation, project planning and coordination, project control, project reporting and communication.

Project Management is primarily concerned with planning and coordinating the resources to deploy a major Release within the predicted cost, time and quality estimates.

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. Release activities include planning, designing, configuration, rollout planning, testing communication and deployment. 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.

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.

Plutora Release Management

Plutora provides Project Managers and Release Managers a cloud-based Release Management tool that enables them to plan, execute and coordinate releases across complex interdependent applications.