Release and Deployment

Deploying releases into production is fraught with difficulty

With so many interested constituencies, processes can go wrong in more ways than they can go right. The problems start when requirements are gathered and, if unmanaged, can flow unchecked through the entire process, potentially delivering something that’s bound to fail while, paradoxically, exactly meeting the specification.

In Release and Deployment: An ITSM Narrative Account, we follow the story of the release & deployment process in fictional form.

Product overview

Chris has got a new job as a release manager – but he's struggling. Parachuted into a large company to fix its release & deployment process after the catastrophic failure of its new app, Asgard, he finds himself battling an array of insular department heads who are all determined that whatever has gone wrong must be another team’s fault. They all want the finger of blame pointed elsewhere, and Chris seems to be the perfect target – so they shout down his questions and suggestions as insubordination.

How can he pacify his new colleagues, avoid getting fired and get the job done?

Lessons from real projects in a narrative format

This latest ITSM narrative from Daniel Mclean explains the common pitfalls of release & deployment in fictional form, with each chapter describing a difficult meeting with a different department head and featuring a set of pointers that our hero would have found beneficial.

Based on the real-life experience of the author and other ITSM practitioners, Release and Deployment: An ITSM Narrative Account exposes the potential pitfalls and explores how to handle the issues that come with such projects, all in the face of shifting organisational structures and changing management objectives.

Contents

1. Winning The Job
2. Where Did My Job Go?
3. Finance – Wisdom or Indifference?
4. Bad Beginnings
5. Requirements – Voice of the Business
6. Sales – Heart of the Business
7. Application Development
8. Infrastructure – Physical Clouds
9. QA – Guardians of the Gates
10. Management Intervention
11. Change Management – Short Circuit
12. Release – Let Slip the Dogs of War
13. Deploy – The End of the Beginning

About the author

Daniel McLean is an ITSM consultant with over 20 years' experience in IT. He has spent the last ten years designing, implementing and operating processes supporting ITSM. He was also a peer reviewer during development of the OGC ITIL v3 Service Strategy Best Practice.

Daniel McLean’s other ITSM narrative accounts are also available from IT Governance.