Siebel Systems - Events - Siebel CIO Shares Best Practices for Release Management
I'm hoping to learn more about Release Management, since it's a discipline I haven't really had an opportunity to work in or explore, despite many years in IT. It seems to he really necessary to control change management in both business process and IT infrastructure.
Recap: The presenter didn't really give many details on the nuts and bolts (coordinating development cycles with release cycles) of how RM happens at Siebel. What was impressive though was his imersion (sp?) in what the key KPIs of Siebel are...which really does show alignment of IT with business.
Continue reading for what I blogged...
RM and reduced IT complexity can improve agility in that you only have implementations to change when you want to change.
Best RM Practices...
RM KPIs...
Real Big (Elephants) and Real Small (Mice) projects present their own problems in relation to RM. You want ' Big Cats'...big enough to make an impact but not too small to go unnoticed.
60-day Drumbeat: Coordinated release, mapped out for each IT Application AND across applications.
Q: How are Key Initiatives for the year determined? How is it decided what goes into a release? A: Top 12-15 executives yearly meet (3 days) to discuss trends, cust sat, etc. Each organization then puts up 12-month rolling plan, which is then communicated to entire staff who then offer what changes will need to be made to meet those plans.
They communicate the release schedule to all employees via their internal portal.
Q: Accomplishment in 2003 slide: How does RM impact these Metrics and Improvements? I'm not quite getting it. These seem like results from the enhancements released, not a result of RM. Maybe I'm being dense.
They have IT Program Managers who work with their 'customers' to maintain the business process improvement maps. Maybe this is their way to get their priorities.
Maybe it's just me, but there is a lot in this presentation, so far, about Siebel and how they measure success than about Siebel's release process. It does show that their CIO has a pretty good handle on what makes the business tic and what his internal customers need in the way of data / analytics, but let's see if this knowledge of the business directly impacts their RM process and strategy.
Upgrade Frequently: They upgrade their infrastructure (Siebel products, 1 instance over 2 load-balanced data centers) up to 10 times a year, which is asynchronous to their 60-day business process improvement releases.
Communication Before / During / After each Release helps smooth the change management.
World-class support, both self-service (FAQ, 2-minute training) and help desk, is key to getting through each release.
Siebel is starting a Application Management Service that will offer their best practices as a service to customer.
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