Maturity model for Comprehensive Change and Release Management

BMC's goal is to assist your organization to reach the next step of change management maturity by planning and managing changes according to standards, enforcing policies, and provisioning to increase efficiency while minimizing user impact and gaining maximum value from processes.

The maturity model for Comprehensive Change and Release Management includes the following phases:

• Defining change processes
• Configuration management
• Release processes

This topic describes the following phases:

Phase 1 — Defining change processes

In this phase, you define a change lifecycle process model, and plan and define each stage of the change process from creating the change to closing it after it has been completed. The goal is to implement changes efficiently while minimizing negative impact on users during the implementation.

When planning the change processes, you must consider how the change requires the current configuration data, business data, and obligatory service delivery data during that stage to minimize risks. The processes should integrate defined service levels using BMC Service Level Management.

This phase also includes planning for processes to deal with emergency changes and implementation of frequent low-level changes.

The goals of this phase are to:

• Define change processes to implement changes in an efficient manner
• Minimize negative impact during change implementation
• Integrate defined service levels using BMC Service Level Management
• Define processes for emergency change requests
• Define processes for implementation of frequent change types

Phase 2 — Configuration management

Using well-defined configuration practices is essential, whether you are planning a change or concluding a change activity. Integrating with applications that provide required information about configuration items (CIs) helps you to determine available configurations and define how to handle them during the implementation of a change.

The BMC Asset Management and BMC Configuration Management applications help manage information related to CIs. The BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping (BMC Atrium Discovery) product provides the infrastructure to identify CIs and store related information in the BMC Atrium Configuration Management Database (BMC Atrium CMDB). Service Asset Lifecycle provides detailed information about the service asset lifecycle.

This phase includes processes that ensure that effective decisions are made for assessing risk, prioritization, or the escalation process.

The goals of this phase are to:

• Integrate with BMC Asset Management
• Understand what CIs are available
• Determine how to handle available CIs

Phase 3 — Release processes

A release is a set of changes that are moved into the production environment at the same time. During this phase, you define the release processes that define and plan a release and coordinate the release until closure of the release request. A release can be part of a larger project defined in BMC IT Business Management and can be initiated from within that application.

This phase also includes automation of the deployment process using the BMC BladeLogic Server Automation Suite.

The goals of this phase are to:

• Define release processes
• Integrate implementation of releases that are a part of a larger project
• Automate deployment processes