ITIL Release and Deployment Management

Streamline your ITIL release process to enhance planning and deployment, minimize errors and maximize benefits

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Simplify Deployment

Monitor Changes

Control Infrastructure

Visualize Updates

Check Approvals

Simplify IT release management deployment and minimize interruptions

New software releases have several moving parts—and successful release management deployment involves seamlessly coordinating them. While this can quickly get out of hand, SolarWinds Service Desk, a capable ITSM software with release management functionality, will allow you to combine changes related to similar systems into a single release. By unifying these related changes, you can streamline deployment and reduce the need for outages. Additionally, you can integrate Service Desk with your CMDB to help ensure correct configurations across your entire system, bringing your employees and clients a smooth delivery experience with minimal interruptions.

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Monitor changes occurring within a single system

Change management is about planning and implementing modifications, while ITIL release management refers to coordinating software releases ensuring changes integrate seamlessly and safely.

Service Desk makes managing changes straightforward, offering documentation and visibility to minimize disruption and maintain consistency. Easily gain insights from the software’s audit logs, visualize updates in the user-friendly dashboard, and check approvals during deployment.

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Controlled infrastructure using configuration management database (CMDB)

CMDB software can provide visibility into your organization’s infrastructure, allowing you to track and manage IT assets and their dependencies. Once you understand the relationships between your IT assets, you can resolve any incidents faster, make more informed decisions, and address problems before they occur. As a result, CMDB software can greatly simplify software release management, enabling you to tackle issues quickly or avoid them altogether.

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Visualize updates throughout the release management process

Release schedules involve multiple teams and stakeholders, meaning ensuring everyone is on the same page can be tricky. However, the right release management tool can make all the difference, giving everyone visibility into the process, no matter where they are.

While plenty of release management tools are available, Service Desk stands out. With its comprehensive audit logs, you can immediately visualize updates in a user-friendly dashboard. Team members will also have immediate insight into updates and notifications, so managers can intervene in approvals and oversee any steps taken during the release process.

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Use ITIL release management to check approvals made during deployment

Managing a software release is a team effort that requires input from several parties. Every change made needs multiple approval tiers— this goes beyond just IT teams. HR and business departments are also often involved in software releases, which can make release management more complicated.

SolarWinds Service Desk simplifies and streamlines ITIL release management and deployment by logging approvals and enabling users to check them throughout the process.

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Get More on IT Release Management Tools

Do you find yourself asking…

What is release management in ITIL?
What is deployment management?
How does release management work?
What are the stages of release management in ITIL?
How do CMDB, change management, and release management affect each other?
ITIL release management process best practices
What are the advantages of implementing ITIL release management?

According to the Information Technological Infrastructure Library (ITIL), release management, also known as software release management, involves planning, scheduling, and controlling software releases. ITIL release management includes testing software to ensure its updates work in a live environment, and it can bridge the gap between your new IT projects and your ongoing operations, allowing for a smooth launch. Overall, release management is a very holistic process encompassing a release from end to end and requires coordinating several projects and changes within the release package.

By having a single rollout schedule, you can ensure everything runs smoothly throughout the release cycle. Your various changes and updates will work together and can be deployed into a live environment more seamlessly. Plus, any problems occur will be carefully documented, helping technicians find resolutions faster and avoid similar issues in the future. Ultimately, release management ITIL can help you better collaborate, optimize the user experience, consistently meet any delivery deadlines, satisfy your business goals, and ensure profitability—and having the right release management software on your side can make a major difference.

To ensure your ITIL release lifecycle management process is as effective as possible, you’ll want to:

Evaluate your existing release management processes: One of the first things you should do before a release is reflect on your current release management ITIL process. Think about where the touch points are, where validation and verification occur, and where you regularly run into roadblocks.

Document everything: Proper documentation is essential, as it will allow all team members to understand what is happening at any given time.

Keep your staging environment as close to the live environment as possible: You can’t properly test releases and updates in your testing environment if it isn’t a direct replication of your live environment. By keeping your staging environment as close as possible to your live environment, you’ll be able to catch issues better and fix bugs.

Automate processes: When done correctly, automation can save everyone time and energy. You can’t and shouldn’t automate everything, but you might consider automating things like quality assurance, feature releases, and release schedules. After all, manual releases require time and may be prone to human errors exacerbated in fast-paced release cycles. By automating certain tasks, you can give your team more energy to focus on more important tasks.

Train team members: While it can be tempting to rely on one experienced person who is very familiar with deployments or solving problems because they’re so efficient, this can be detrimental if they call out sick or leave the company. Instead, provide sufficient training for everyone on the team and ensure they all have a chance to perform each role throughout the IT release management lifecycle.

Invest in the right release management tool: Release and deployment management isn’t easy. There are lots of moving parts and many individuals involved, which means keeping track of everything and keeping all parties informed along the way can be tricky. Enter release management tools. Using a quality IT release management tool can simplify the ITSM release management process and provide increased visibility to everyone involved.

According to the Information Technological Infrastructure Library (ITIL), release management, also known as software release management, involves planning, scheduling, and controlling software releases. ITIL release management includes testing software to ensure its updates work in a live environment, and it can bridge the gap between your new IT projects and your ongoing operations, allowing for a smooth launch. Overall, release management is a very holistic process encompassing a release from end to end and requires coordinating several projects and changes within the release package.
By having a single rollout schedule, you can ensure everything runs smoothly throughout the release cycle. Your various changes and updates will work together and can be deployed into a live environment more seamlessly. Plus, any problems occur will be carefully documented, helping technicians find resolutions faster and avoid similar issues in the future. Ultimately, release management ITIL can help you better collaborate, optimize the user experience, consistently meet any delivery deadlines, satisfy your business goals, and ensure profitability—and having the right release management software on your side can make a major difference.
In ITIL, there are a few key steps, including:
Release planning: Effective planning is crucial as it lays the foundation for organized and successful execution. Here, you’ll want to define the scope and content of your upcoming release. Outline the requirements and functions for the software, determine which changes will be part of the release, reflect on potential risks, consider the chain of approval, and put together a schedule for building and deployment.
Release build and testing: Next, it’s time to get to work on building and testing the release. Use a staging environment as close to the production environment while testing your changes and updates. This will allow you to see changes without impacting the current version that existing users currently rely on. Your quality assurance teams can then review your staging environment and test new features and additions. You may also have a dark launch by making the release available to a small group of beta testers.
Release deployment: After you’ve built and tested updates, you can move onto deployment. You’ll want to check that the release is ready for deployment, verify the deployment order, deploy your release packet to the live environment, and notify all involved parties.
Early life support: Once your release package has been deployed, you’ll want your release, software development management, and incident management teams to work together to address any operational issues and ensure peak performance.
Release closure: In this stage, your release activities will formally come to a close. You can send your project teams any metrics, outcomes, and feedback.
Throughout this entire process, a release management tool can be used to increase transparency and make operations more efficient.
To ensure your ITIL release lifecycle management process is as effective as possible, you’ll want to:
Evaluate your existing release management processes: One of the first things you should do before a release is reflect on your current release management ITIL process. Think about where the touch points are, where validation and verification occur, and where you regularly run into roadblocks.
Document everything: Proper documentation is essential, as it will allow all team members to understand what is happening at any given time.
Keep your staging environment as close to the live environment as possible: You can’t properly test releases and updates in your testing environment if it isn’t a direct replication of your live environment. By keeping your staging environment as close as possible to your live environment, you’ll be able to catch issues better and fix bugs.
Automate processes: When done correctly, automation can save everyone time and energy. You can’t and shouldn’t automate everything, but you might consider automating things like quality assurance, feature releases, and release schedules. After all, manual releases require time and may be prone to human errors exacerbated in fast-paced release cycles. By automating certain tasks, you can give your team more energy to focus on more important tasks.
Train team members: While it can be tempting to rely on one experienced person who is very familiar with deployments or solving problems because they’re so efficient, this can be detrimental if they call out sick or leave the company. Instead, provide sufficient training for everyone on the team and ensure they all have a chance to perform each role throughout the IT release management lifecycle.
Invest in the right release management tool: Release and deployment management isn’t easy. There are lots of moving parts and many individuals involved, which means keeping track of everything and keeping all parties informed along the way can be tricky. Enter release management tools. Using a quality IT release management tool can simplify the ITSM release management process and provide increased visibility to everyone involved.

“SolarWinds Service Desk is acting as a multiple solution platform for us. We’ve gone from six different platforms to one. It brings our departments much closer together.”

Gilad Vinitsky

CTO

The BLOC

A ITIL release management tool to simplify your life

Service Desk

Automate user service request management from ticket creation, assignment, routing, and escalation.
Use built-in reports to track ticket status, technician performance, and customer support needs.
Leverage a built-in help desk knowledge base to create and maintain KB articles and promote end-user self-service for common issues.

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