Predecessors/Before You Begin

Release and deployment management is very closely related to change management, and arguably a successor to a good change management program.  Please make sure you understand change management before diving into release management.

No formal guidance exists, to my knowledge, describing how to marry project management, software development, and ITIL together. Yet these three areas almost always exist, and overlap, in an IT organization.

Previously I've written about project management and change management, but here I'm talking about more generally how you could fit the PMBOK, CMMI and/or Agile development, and ITIL together.

Here is my advice:

• Acknowledge you must interpret the guidance
  

I have been learning more about the Project Management Institute's Project Management Professional (PMP) certificate. It's interesting to see the overlap between ITIL certification and PMP certification.

In content, the PMP and ITIL foundations are very different. The two have different meanings for change control and configuration control. Perhaps the best tie-in is to think about ITIL's "services" as the products of a project.

Kelley Anderson of Carnegie Mellon University presented a session titled “Development of a Project Management Office. The presentation gave insight into the current status of project management at Carnegie Mellon by discussing the critical decisions that were made over the past year. For example, should you take a “top down” (portfolio management) approach or a “bottom up” (project management) approach when you have limited FTEs dedicated full time to project management? CMU opted for the top down approach.

Our "process management and continual service improvement" role has existed for just under a year now--we were formed in late November 2007. In that time, we've done a fair bit of work, much of which has been documenting our existing processes. Notably, we have created wholly new things, such as our change management process and a service catalog.

Process improvement can "get away" from you. Small pieces of work, such as documenting who's involved when in a routine task, can snowball into large pieces of work taking months. To manage our workload, establish concrete goals, and to set priorities we have been managing our work by calendar quarters.

IT Service Management depends heavily on the effective operation of project management and business analysis. Hopefully on the site we will be talking about project management and business analysis--at least enough so that Universities can get pointers on how to become more effective at project management and requirements gathering.

"Slideshare" is a web site that lets people share slide presentations with one another. Recently the "Better Projects" blog linked to two Slideshare presentations, about Scrum and about the BABOK (Business Analyst Body of Knowledge) v2.