Release management can be applied on the whole company or an organization in order to achieve great success in any given project. The first step that would be undertaken by an organization in order to implement release management is to set a group of applications to be recognized as the goal and the target of the project. These applications would include vital and essential applications such as business terms and SoX managed applications. Also schedules should be set to identify and allow changes to occur. These changes are developed and then conveyed to a production control team. The setting of these applications should be accompanied by a less known implementation which is the development of different policies for the above mentioned applications in terms of release management.

The next step is the mapping. At this step, a great amount of tension would occur. This mapping process basically studies and sets what is going to be changed and when is it going to change in respect to the current time schedule. In the usual cases, the mapping plan or vision would have two years in horizon. One year, or twelve month would be firm and ninety days would be locked. Of course, big organizations that develop services or products plan to be very responsive to the client and users. So if an organization is trying to achieve a specified goal or target, locking ninety days will obviously not work. Also there will be no horizon of two years; it would only be a six month horizon.

There is another huge problem that would face the release management of regular projects. The fact is that any given framework and time schedule includes the project itself but it doesn’t allow for the sudden changes that has to be made. Sometimes the whole plan and scope of the project can change in the middle of it which will need more time. So if the timeframe if the project didn’t account for that, it would be a major setback.

Although, once the project’s goals and requirements are set and specified clearly, there should be no delay what so ever in the deployment of the project. There also should be no need for a schedule that has more than ninety days in its horizon. In order for a release management of a project to go as smoothly as it can be, it has to account for all the above mentioned problems and address them in order to avoid any setbacks in the project.

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Back in the 80s when organizations first decided to automate their systems, it was the role of the project manager to oversee and supervise the development. The functions that could be done by using an IT system were very limited and the work that had to be done was distributed between the manpower and the computer. For someone at that time to become the leader of the project or the release management, he didn’t need any certifications or knowledge in the language of programming. All what was needed is for him to be successful in analyzing business systems.

In this day, it is a different story as the management systems now are 100% automated and the role of manpower and the human agents have been decreased drastically until it became minimal. This is due to the fact that many decisions that had to be taken by the human operates are now being taken by the computers and the automated management system. Any management system has to be accompanied by 3rd party applications and programming languages.

Only a few decisions have to be taken by the head of the release management team. This is why these decisions would require the release or project manager to have a specific amount of knowledge in programming language in order to take decisions related to it. This is why he will need to be familiar with the various 3rd party applications in order to make the best decisions and to choose the best one that would fit the system.

This is why the only persons who have enough knowledge and familiarity with the programming languages and the 3rd party applications available on the market and their efficiency with the programming language that the management system uses can become the head of the release management team. After the system successes in passing the testing stage, any mistakes that are found and discovered by the configuration manager are then conveyed to the head of the release management team. The release manager then sends the system back to the software developers in order to carry on the necessary tweaks and changes to avoid such defects. The very first two steps will keep repeating until the program is found perfect by the configuration managers in order to make sure that the final outcome of the program doesn’t contain any errors. Of course, even after the implementation, there will still be the need for the developers to give the release manager the IT support he needs.

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In order for release management to succeed and achieve the expected results it has to begin with analyzing the problems then propose different solutions and finally to apply tremendous effort implementing these solutions. There are several problems that face any company or an IT firm that tries to implement it.  The first one that causes a lot of confusion is defining and understanding what are the things that fall under the control of release management. This is why the first step is stating and defining what is under the control of change control and what is not.

For example, for an IT business the things that would be under the management of release management will include several things. These things include anything that is related to network configurations and any changes with the production computing environment of the data center. This includes application software changes that are asked by the customer or the IT team. It also included any upgrades that need to be implemented to the infrastructure of the server or the network which includes DBMS, hardware and OS among others. As for the things that were not included. It was the needed application fixes for the emergency production software. Any emergency fixes should be the responsibility of the software developer team and its manager and not the responsibility of the release manager.

The second issue is to know who is responsible for what parts of the project. The projects are always managed from the start to the end by project managers. The problem is at any big organization, any four project managers would have from two to five projects under their control. These projects include fixing bugs and client service change among other things. This is why each project manager has to know his own tasks and to recognize the tasks of the stakeholders. Release management will succeed if the release manager himself known his tasks which will then be conveyed to the different stakeholders who will then recognize the scope and the tasks tasked to them.

The solution for this problem is SPOC. SPOC stands for single point of contact. This was a great model to be used in order to follow the responsibility of different team and team members and to hold every one accountable for his responsibility. By using this model, the SPOC, it was easy to follow the progress of each team in order to hold them accountable for their outcome.