The best practice of any operation is far from revolution but you can always make the best use of the system that you have.  The wide spread culture of DevOps is no surprise to the ones who have already started utilizing it to focus on maximizing the efficiency of the enterprises.

Here is an analysis of organizations that incorporated DevOps Release Management (RM) and reaped high benefits.

A 100 year old popular UK based pharmacy led retailer was consistently trying to serve its customers with higher quality and user experience. But to deliver such superior service they faced huge complexities created by manual practice where, numerous spreadsheets were divergent to meet the requirements of the portfolio with better visibility. It did not have a single view of project and test environment requirement that caused loss of efficient resource and time. Poor tracking and recording of process and upgrades led to missing/ skipping several steps and created production issues that affected security and compliance.

The release management tool was used to provide the following output

  • The test environment management productivity increased with reduced collaboration giving 100% visibility.
  • Combined scheduling for higher visibility and transparency
  • Assigned environment across all portfolios
  • Recorded the configuration data for all environments

Overall benefits:

By the usage of Release management tools, the company was able to reap the following benefits

  • 30% time saving on coordinating with single source
  • 140% increase in productivity- test environment
  • 100% visibility to delivery process
  • Improved quality with predictability
  • Environments and deliveries became independent of spreadsheet
  • Streamlined the process with consistency
  • Improved usage of time and resource
  • Reduced production issues and avoided release failures
  • Enhanced team collaboration and coordination
  • Better tracking and recording process
  • Improved compliance and security

In yet another case, an airlines company implemented release management and transformed it to provide great outcomes. It is an 88000 member organization serving 140+ million passengers across 50 countries covering hundreds of domestic and international destinations. While launching a pilot process to establish release model in their application, the company faced issues with the manual process and spreadsheets. Hence, it decided to enhance the usage of release management to ensure credibility and save time. During this process of transformation, it fortified metrics and governance programs by leveraging data across decisions through RM. The release management was incorporated in four steps such as

  • Planning to understand the needs of applications and portfolios to ensure success
  • Coordination to ensure the identification and completion of planning with the pre-release activities
  • Execution to release the application according to the plan and escalate in case of divergence
  • Automation to manage releases pipeline from development to production using tools automatically

With this process, they were able to

  • Move manual release management process to orchestrate and automate processes which is leveraged further
  • Access release status for better decision making skills
  • Obtain automated and high visibility and feedback on testing process
  • Leverage the continuous delivery pipeline to improve outcomes
  • Automate delivery risk identification based on complexities, interdependencies and codes
  • Refine RM responsibilities and redefine release scopes which prevent risks

With these transitions and implementation of DevOps practices in enterprises across various sectors, we see that the deployment job is moved onto the DevOps team. Release management has several insights into changes made and analyzes the causes so as to enhance collaboration and improve process. With the discussed real time scenarios, it is reinforced that embracing release management is a smart way out to improve releases. If you think DevOps is a suitable practice for your company, act immediately and reach out to us. You may also dive in deep into the ocean of release management and other dimensions of DevOps through our webinar.

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