In spring 2008, I took the ITIL v2: Release & Control course from Global Knowledge.  Our department is about to move off campus, so in packing I found my notes from that class.  Here's a summary of the class:

Configuration Management

Configuration items are

• Used to deliver a service
• Uniquely identifiable
• Manageable
• Configurable

You need to understand a CI's scope and detail.

Configuration management activities:

Dave Howard from Toyota Financial Services gave this talk on release management.
At the moment, I can't find my notes.  The main thing I remember is that they have created a release process for any new environment.  For each environment needed for a project (e.g. dev, test, and prod), you have to go through a process of architecture design creation and review, specification creation and review, and finally the actual build.

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.

Cross-posted to http://www.educause.edu/blog/borwick/SummaryRibbonsintheSkyACustome/173072.

Julie Leary and Amy Martin from Towson University gave this presentation, "Ribbons in the Sky: A Customer-Focused Approach to Implementing Change."

As I mentioned last fall, we manage our continual service improvement program quarter by quarter: each quarter we select certain critical projects, and then as we have time we "pick up" other work and add it to our list.

Separate but related to this concept of quarterly improvement "releases," we have also created a "semi-annual governing document review." Twice a year we get several relevant staff members together to review our "governing documents"--our policies, standards, and procedures. We don't make major changes, but we make sure that everything makes sense together, uses the latest template, etc.

When I first read the ITIL v2 core books, the process I had the most difficulty with was release management. What's release management for, anyways? I had a difficult time understanding what release management could help me with, until attending itSMFusion 2007.

If you generalize "release management" to coordinating smaller units of work into larger, more manageable pieces of work, here are a few types of things that might benefit from release management:

I went to the 10AM presentation on Release Management: "Release Management Maturation Experiences." The speaker, from Unilever, described how they enacted release management for two domains: their infrastructure, and their client desktop/laptops. I went because I don't really understand Release Management, and the speaker helped me feel better: he said Release Management is the least understood process, and that Release Management for them is an extension of change management.