Release and Deployment Management
| The purpose of Release and Deployment Management is to maintain the integrity of an organization’s production environment when implementing releases. Effective Release and Deployment processes allow service organizations to deliver change faster, with minimal risk to the business. It provides consistency in implementation approach and assures customers that they can use new, or changed services in line with business requirements.
LiveTime Service Manager’s tight integration between the embedded CMDB and Change Management, which extends into Release and Deployment enables the planning, scheduling and controlling of changes and updates from test to live environments. LiveTime protects the integrity of the live environment by ensuring correct components are released, with the ability to create and manage deployment tasks for implementing new or updating hardware, software, documentation and processes to the live environment. Manage Release LifecycleLiveTime’s fully configurable workflows allow service and support organizations to follow consistent processes across the typical planning, building, installing, testing and deployment lifecycle phases of release packages. This process is overseen by the Release Manager, whose role is paramount to the success of a release and a required member of a Release Team within LiveTime.
The Release Manager directs the process using all information presented to help assess release readiness, and to efficiently identify deployment targets for the deployment phases of a release. This level of control guarantees the Release Manager can deliver updates to the live environment successfully, to all relevant parties, on time. |
Minimize impact
Export Projects for End-to-End ManagementComplex and generally a lengthy process, large scale deployments require project management to ensure success. To this end, Release Management includes related activities that require scheduling in and around the internal activities of the service desk. LiveTime readily achieves this by exporting release package information to Microsoft Project and administering the full process using a dedicated project management tool. Exported project files contain all related Change Requests for a Release, providing the Release Manager with an end-to-end schedule of change. The export can also be filtered to include deployment activities that can be merged into the final schedule once the Implementation of Changes is completed, resulting in a full historical account of the release cycle. |
The capability to leverage relationship maps defined within LiveTime’s inbuilt CMDB allows Release Managers to assess the impact of a release, as all related Items can be easily associated with a release package. The extensive use of CIʼs to represent all aspects of a release and the capability to directly associate any category of CI with the release itself provides a complete picture of how a release will impact the organization before any tasks are undertaken. The Release Manager can identify CI Types impacted by the deployment and CMDB information details users, organizational units and specific infrastructure affected by a release.
