Change and Release Management
Respond to Business needs faster and improve the success rate of your deployments.
Un-managed and ad hoc approaches to Change and Release Management result in:
- Too many unauthorized or emergency changes
- Unnecessarily frequent deployments
- Long change turnaround time
- Deployments that require too much manual effort
- Failed deployments
- Deployments that require re-work
- Change-related incidents that impact service
- Low user satisfaction
Workshop: Change and Release Management
Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.
Do-It-Yourself Implementation
The slides in this Best Practice Blueprint will walk you step-by-step through every phase of your project with supporting tools and templates ready for you to use.
Project Accelerator Workshop
You can also use this Best Practice Blueprint to facilitate your own project accelerator workshop within your organization using the workshop slides and facilitation instructions provided in the Appendix.
Module 1: Define the Target State
The Purpose
- Identify your current pain points.
- Identify the benefits of a more rigorous Change and Release Management process.
- Assess your current process completeness and maturity.
- Choose an appropriate target state and level of investment for Change and Release Management.
- Document your ideal process.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Make the case for Change and Release Management and obtain stakeholder buy-in.
- Identify process gaps in order to better prioritize your improvement efforts.
- Avoid over or under investing in Change and Release Management.
- Document an effective process that can be implemented at your organization.
Activities
Outputs
Identify pain points.
- Process benefits
Complete a maturity assessment.
- Current maturity level
Choose a target state.
- Target state
Document an ideal process.
- Complete Change and Release Management process
Included Resources
Change and Release Management Maturity Assessment Tool
Define the Target State
Module 2: Intake, Assess, Design, and Build
The Purpose
- Define roles and responsibilities.
- Adapt SOPs for making and receiving RFCs.
- Standardize the process for Standard and Emergency changes.
- Adapt SOPs for assessing change impact and risk.
- Adapt SOPs for designing and building your releases.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Clearly define your roles and responsibilities.
- Categorize changes more effectively and avoid misuse of the Emergency category.
- Ensure that the proper level of process rigor is applied to different types of change.
- Standardize the change assessment process to better prioritize changes.
- Balance the potential benefit of each change with its risk to the Business through proper change assessment.
- Deploy less frequently.
Activities
Outputs
Define roles and responsibilities.
- Roles and responsibilities
Design your RFC form.
- Request for Change form
Categorize changes.
- Change categories
Map out separate processes for Standard and Emergency changes.
- Emergency and Standard change processes
Adapt SOPs for assessing and evaluating changes.
- SOPs for assessing and evaluating changes
Decide how changes will be bundled.
- SOPs for building and designing releases
Determine the appropriate level of build automation.
Included Resources
Change and Release Management Standard Operating Procedure
Request for Change Form
Intake, Assess, Design, and Build
Module 3: Plan, Test, and Approve
The Purpose
- Adapt SOPs for planning releases.
- Adapt SOPs for comprehensively testing releases.
- Establish a Change Advisory Board.
- Adapt SOPs for approving requests for change.
- Adapt SOPs for fairly prioritizing and scheduling changes.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Avoid investing in the testing of changes that are likely to be rejected by the CAB.
- Enjoy a higher deployment success rate due to more rigorous and comprehensive testing.
- Empower a CAB to protect the live environment from poorly assessed, tested, and implemented changes.
- Deliver benefits to the organization faster by prioritizing changes in a way that balances the potential positive impact of a change with the potential risk.
- Avoid negatively impacting users by scheduling releases in a way that minimizes conflict and disruption.
Activities
Outputs
Adapt SOPs for creating release implementation plans.
- SOPs for release planning
Adapt SOPs for testing releases and ensuring user acceptance.
- SOPs for release testing
Identify CAB members.
- List of CAB members and attendees
Establish CAB standards and protocol.
- CAB review, assembly, and voting standards
Set standards for prioritizing and scheduling changes.
- CAB prioritization and scheduling standards
Set emergency CAB protocol.
- Emergency CAB protocol
Included Resources
Change Advisory Board (CAB) Charter
Plan, Test, and Approve
Module 4: Release Deployment and Action Plan
The Purpose
- Adapt SOPs for release deployment.
- Adapt SOPs for handing the release over to operations and assessing implementation success.
- Create a detailed action plan for establishing and optimizing your change and release process.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Deploy releases successfully.
- Ensure that users are adequately prepared to accept the changes associated with a release.
- Ensure that both technical and user validation is obtained for every release.
- Implement your new process and track progress for stakeholders.
Activities
Outputs
Adapt SOPs for release deployment.
- SOPs for release deployment, including a pre-deployment checklist
Adapt SOPs for executing post-deployment activities.
- Post-Implementation review
Identify toolset requirements.
- A list of automation requirements to aid in toolset procurement
Choose key performance metrics.
- A metrics tracking tool to measure progress and facilitate continuous improvement
Create an action plan.
- An action plan for successfully implementing the SOPs adapted during the workshop
Included Resources
Change and Release Management Metrics Tool
Release Deployment and Action Plan
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