RMS Services • Market leaders in resource management solutions throughout Europe • Thornbury, Bristol

RMS Services ITIL Release & Deployment Management

The purpose of Release and Deployment Management is to:

• Define and agree release and deployment plans with customers and stakeholders
• Ensure that each release package consists of a set of related assets and service components that are compatible with each other
• Ensure that the integrity of a release package and its constituent components is maintained throughout the transition activities and recorded accurately in the CMS
• Ensure that all release or deployment packages can be tracked, installed, tested, verified and/or uninstalled or backed out if appropriate
• Ensure that organisation and stakeholder change is managed through the release and deployment activities
• Record and manage deviations, risks and issues related to the new or changed service and take necessary corrective action
• Ensure that there is knowledge transfer to enable the customers and users to optimise their use of the service to support their business activities
• Ensure that skills and knowledge are transferred to operations and support staff to enable them to effectively and efficiently deliver, support and maintain the service according to required warranties and service levels

The goal of Release and Deployment Management is to deploy releases into production and establish effective use of the service in order to deliver value to the customer and be able to hand over to operations:

• The objective of Release and Deployment Management is to ensure that:
• There are clear and comprehensive release and deployment plans that enable the customer and business change projects to align their activities with these plans
• A release package can be built, installed, tested and deployed efficiently to a deployment group or target environment successfully and on target
• A new or changed service and its enabling systems, technology and organisation are capable of delivery the required service requirements i.e. utilities, warranties and service levels
• There is minimal unpredicted impact on the production services, operations and support organisation
• Customers, users and Service Management staff are satisfied with their Service Transition practices and outputs, e.g. user documentation and training

The RMS solution supports the Release and Deployment Process by:

• Allowing the workflow associated with producing a release to be defined within a model, so that best practice can be applied to the release, covering all aspects of the release process, including planning, risk assessment, identifying service requirements, testing, documentation and training
• Producing a forward schedule of change, which documents the agreed release plan with the customer
• Being able define the release package with the CMS
• Being able to link the actual deployment packages, such as an installer or script, to the change record, so that the original and new versions can be stored in a controlled manner
• Tracking the actual versions of software within the CMS with a full audit trail of changes
• Defining the training and documentation requirements within the process and holding the definitive copies within the CMS.
• Giving visibility to the business of the release plans through the web portal, to help them align their projects with the IT projects.
• Updating the Service Records within the CMS for use by Operations, for handover purposes

The process management of Release and Deployment Management is accomplished through the RMS Change Management module, being used alongside a deployment tool such as Microsoft SCCM.