Enterprise Release Management (ERM) encompasses a set of organisational methodologies and approaches explicitly crafted to support enterprise change initiatives and software deployment across multiple portfolios and projects.
Are your delivery timelines getting stretched? Are your projects suffering due to mismanaged resource allocation? You might need to revisit and strategise your enterprise release management processes.
The right IT environment manager and correct release management can align your organisational processes with software delivery timelines without compromising quality.
In this article, we'll discuss 5 best practices for enterprise release management that will enable your organisation to remove bottlenecks and streamline your software delivery process.
What Is the Enterprise Release Management Process?
As discussed earlier, in the IT industry, enterprise release management pertains to developing, releasing and deploying software applications to the end-users within an organisation.
Goals of Enterprise Release Management
The main objectives of enterprise release management include:
- Risk management across the software delivery lifecycle
- Development and release process optimisation and monitoring
- Maintain consistent delivery goals
- Deliver an immersive and valuable user experience
- Ensure generating profits and fulfil business goals
How Does Enterprise Release Management Work?
The process for creating every software is different. The intensity of testing and intricacy of the codebase varies depending on the software functionality and application.
For example, software designed for tracking employee activity has stark differences in testing and codebase compared to aircraft software. An aircraft software needs to undergo rigorous testing, create extensive documentation and integrate multiple, stringent bug fixes to meet narrow performance tolerances before it gets a green signal.
A disciplined enterprise release management process ensures that software is developed, tested, and deployed while adhering to the primary stakeholder's approvals. The QA team will check the application to verify whether it performs as it's supposed to and if it's ready for delivery on schedule.
Enterprise release management combines the following components of the software delivery lifecycle in one primary repository:
- The business goals of fulfilling customer requirements, precisely when they need it
- The technical tasks associated with quality assurance and compliance
- The software asset or artifact management
The software artifacts are released from the primary database (repository) to a production environment for deployment.
Therefore, enterprise release management is a bridge connecting distinct software engineering tasks: planning, building, testing, release and maintenance.
An enterprise release isn't limited to the core software engineering functions. While software developers may perceive a release as a successful quality product delivery, various other supporting business activities also need to be executed.
This includes:
- Salesforce training
- Training post-sales and customer support staff
- Advertising and marketing the new product.
These activities need to be aligned and executed along with the software release. Without effective enterprise release management, the delivery process can become complex.
So how do you ensure effective release management? That's where the best practices come into play.
4 Best Practices Defining Efficient Enterprise Release Management
To ensure efficient enterprise release management, take the operational health of the four pillars of release management into consideration.
1. Multi-project Release Coordination
Comprehensive, collated event calendar maintenance across all projects included in a large, composite release. This encompasses the organised deployment of the listed projects to applications in the enterprise operating environment.
2. IT Environment Management
During the application delivery, tracking capacity requirements and understanding the work effort for environments are necessary. Implementing automation for environment provisioning or scheduled use of shared persistent environments.
3. Automated Release Reporting
Comprehensive dashboard view of all vital metrics and KPIs for all release-related processes and resources. It enables all stakeholders to determine the software creation progress toward the enterprise release.
4. Continuous Process Improvement
Support a continuous improvement cycle through analysing release-related metrics and tracking progress throughout the software delivery process.
The four fundamental approaches discussed above define efficient enterprise release management. They should be strategically implemented portfolio-wide to provide IT management teams with visibility and support coordinated releases.
Enterprise Release Management Solving Organisational Problem
Initially, many organisations lacked the infrastructure to manage the release cycle. Enterprise release management emerged as a solution to manage basic release cycle challenges, including bugs and software crashes transitioning to reputation loss, reliability issues, increased expenditure and time wastage.
Certain enterprises struggle with deploying code from one IT environment to another- development to testing and production. While this may cause less impact on the quality but it complicates the organisational operations. Enterprise release management ensures smooth transitioning from one IT environment to the other.
At other times, a company's internal structure and work culture may cause conflicts among teams. The collaborative approach of enterprise release management can decrease friction by eliminating departmental silos.
Similarly, with multiple delivery teams functioning together, the conflict risk increases due to one team's work disrupting another's. An efficient release management process can help enterprises reduce the number of problems.
Hire experienced release management solutions and IT environment manager for streamline release processes.
