The Value of Release Management in the Journey of Information Technology Delivery Aligning to Business Requirements

Over the years, Information technology has become the backbone of businesses to the point, where it would be impossible for many to function (let alone succeed) without it. As a result of its increasing role in the enterprise, the Information Technology function is changing, morphing from a technology provider into a Strategic partner. In every organization, the application and portfolios are becoming increasingly interconnected and dependent on one other, when one is changed-the risk is high for a detrimental impact to the end user services provided by another application. And also, within the Information technology the development and operation teams that deliver and support the mixture of heterogeneous technology applications are distributed, increasingly outsourced to technology partners and the complexity is growing. The aim of the research is to address the raising challenges between business requirement and Information technology i.e., development and operations-the need for release management is crucial. Release Management acts as a bridge between development and operation teams and responsible for driving the release train from planning to deployment ensuring high quality on-schedule releases meeting the business demand. This study explains in detail about the effectively setting up the enterprise release management function and a survey about the importance of release function by interviewing the Information Technology experts around the globe and it is understood that Release management acts as a coordinator to improve the collaboration between disparate team through the strong policies, process and governance. This study also describes the benefits realized through the implementation of a formal release management discipline in major Canada based agriculture financial institution, which improved the quality of its IT release delivery.