Release Management module

The Release Management module helps you plan, build, test, and deploy controlled releases into your IT environment. A release is a collection of related authorized changes to an IT service that are tested and introduced into the live environment together.

Release Management includes built-in ITIL best practices to better track and manage change and deployment activities. Release Management includes default support for managing standard release tasks from planning and design, build and configuration, to rollout and acceptance.

With numerous changes occurring daily, Release Management is the key component in ensuring applications are successfully deployed without compromising the integrity or availability of the production environment. Using a systematic and repeatable release process, organizations can achieve greater success rates of change rollout, higher quality of IT service, and accelerated time-to-market.

Well-planned and implemented release management makes a significant difference to an organization's service costs. Effective release management enables the service provider to add value to the business by:

• Better tracking and managing change and deployment activities
• Automatically notifying stakeholders at every phase of the release process
• Contributing to meeting auditable requirements for traceability through service transition
• Delivering changes faster and at an optimum cost and minimized risk
• Assuring that customers and users can use the new or changed service in a way that supports the business goals
• Improving consistency in the implementation approach across the business change, service teams, suppliers, and customers

Each stage can consist of sub-processes to support putting the change on hold or getting approval to move to the next stage. For more details about features that support each stage of Release Management, see Milestones in the release request lifecycle.

Release Management is tightly integrated with the Activity subsystem, which provides the capability to assign specific units of work ("activities") to support staff but that does not require the complexity of a change request.