Proven tactics for agile IT Release Management - A Case Study

Overview:
This article is the first in a series of five that explain how an IT organization, process management announced that the administration has exceeded expectations and provides a basis for continued success will come. The series includes:

1 How did we get here - FRAMES
2 First steps solution - Definitions and TRIAGE
3 The recruitment and release schedule - the basic solution
Production Change Control 4 - QUALITY CONTROL OF 'FINAL
5 Metrics and Insights -TEACHINGS

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Summary:
Many IT organizations flounder when they are asked to understand, organize and implement numerous changes to the system and application software, its clients and customers for a period of several years. This article explains at a high level of conditions of very practical sense, and common processes that successfully conquered the problem for a company and its IT team. How successful was this part? Frankly, ITMetric is a dark and dangerous element to discuss science. But this organization achieved the following:

- In a year, has increased customer satisfaction rankings from 2.5 to 4.0 of a 5-point scale.
- In a year he sold 85% more requests for changes and projects in production than in the previous 12 months.
- The organization exceeded its objectives of productivity and change course when the request cycle by 40%.
- It is accomplished these results without staff cutsincreased spending on IT and not "software".
- Increase the cost of the IT budget took 3.2% of the cost of a single consultant to cover an instance of the context and processes for release management agile.

What was the secret recipe to make these results possible? The answer requires that we carefully examine the context of this organization.
Background:

The company and its IT department can be characterized as follows:
Company
- Industry -Telecommunications - a segment of a very large Regional Bell Operating Company
- Primary Products - voice mail service and the functions of intellectual property rights
- Consumer-based - 4 million consumers with a growth forecast of 25%
- Total number of employees - about 500 people
- Primary-operation - a call center sales of 300 + people and 24X7 service for consumers to express mail products and features
- Financial - High Line-of-business profit margins in a very large companyStructure
- Everyone has been working in the same building

IT Organization
- IT staff - about 60 - mostly with 2-10 years of organizational history
- Functional online - operations, project management and analysis, system development, quality control and support, configuration management
- Applications - 7 large home-grown sub-systems serving the company direct operations
- HR / Finance / business functions were served by the Parent and processes, with interfaces
-The technology - fairly common languages, operating systems and technical infrastructure (hardware, network, DBMS)
- Recently installed:

- Software configuration management tools, personnel and processes
- It has not produced any change in effective control, the production - the main problem perceived
- Everyone has been working on the same level

Strengthen
- Revenue growth strong and
- Management - usually far in call center management and experience of productsProcess Improvement
- IT Management - 80% 4 + years in this organization and just drop out rate, having only two levels of IT
- Mature and successful IT operations are:

- Project Management

- Quality Assurance Testing
- Several strong plea for a better IT manager release management
- Co-location of IT and its direct customers - operators of the business functions

Weaken
- Managers negotiated private arrangements for their changeRequests and projects installed "before"
- No central clearing house for the needs of the customers IT department to change
- No system of monitoring necessary to take account of all change requests and projects delivered
- Approximately 325 requests / projects believed to be in the game
- A windfall and control / monitoring process for "small" change requests
- Independent programmers could implement application change, the production
- No single point of contact / communicationbetween the IT organization for every small change request
- Nail obtain the current status and the date for implementing each change request hard /
- IT operational changes were completely independent control of organizational change and regarded as a nuisance

Opportunity
- A new opportunity to consolidate and share information on everything in the pot in a single site IT
- The ability to use existing knowledge and maturity of IT staff
- An opportunityReduction of the start / stop nature of computer work because of the entry of competitors and voice by managers
- The opportunity to integrate their IT infrastructure from planned changes to operations

Threats
- Software developers need to add new software - not the management processes
- Business Manager Company enjoyed the photos directly with programming resources
- Tensions between IT managers on what were the best ways to improve organizational
- He had failed in hisfirst attempt last year to change the processes of control and release management
- Consultants rare value

Conclusion / Transition

The IOC, in view of this situation, the manager agreed to the project management and analysis for the implementation of the contract for asset management to release (version 2) is possible. The CIO believed that they could achieve better results in their constituencies to bring about change in a series of well-understood application of updates at regular intervals.He wanted to understand her colleagues also returned a plan, and can be used to directly influence the order of implementation of its change. The manager kept me PM as a Release Manager with the task of creating the processes and controls necessary and the inclusion of all VPS and IT staff in departments as necessary for success.

The rest, they say, is history "agile." To find out what you really need, our story continues with definitions and TRIAGE.

Proven tactics for agile IT Release Management - A Case Study