ITIL also plays "Taijiquan"

Recently, I saw a piece of training material on release management written by foreigners. In this document, publishing management is compared to "overcast" in the Chinese plot, and changing management to "Yang ", I think it is quite interesting. He believes that "publishing" is passive, acceptable, and feminine. "change" is active, strong, and positive. They are combined to form two ideal balance forces to control risks in IT service management. Frankly speaking, I do not fully agree with this metaphor. Foreigners may not fully understand the meaning of "Yin" and "yang" in Chinese culture, but this foreigner is undoubtedly an expert in the ITIL field, he understands the interaction between "change" and "release" and how to control the operation risks of the enterprise's information system through the cooperation and mutual restraint of the two processes.

In the process of communicating with many colleagues, we seem to have some doubts about the role and significance of "release management" and "Change Management" in the IT service management field. "Now that we have changed the management of changes, we can control risks. Why do we need release management ?" "What is the difference between the positioning and significance of release management and change management ?", "What factors need to be considered before a version is released ?", "How should we determine the release management policy ?" "Should the release management be the responsibility of the R & D team or the O & M management team ?" .

These are all very good problems. It is also because it O & M management (e8.itsm) has reached a certain degree of maturity of the Team, will begin to think about these issues. Let me share with you my understanding of these two processes for your reference.

Change management is an overall control process that controls and manages all the risk control processes of hardware, software, environment, personnel, processes, configurations, and documents. Any changes to the production system must be approved by the cab (Change Approval Board), the core audit team in this process. The main review focus of cab is the risks that the change may bring to our production system and the cost of the change (the change management of many enterprises in China is not quite the review cost ). Changes management can be divided into several levels based on their impact on the production system: major changes, major changes, general changes, daily changes, and urgent changes. The personnel involved in the review of each type of change, that is, the cab personnel, are different. Major changes need to be determined by the CIO or even the CEO. daily changes can be directly recorded without passing the cab review.
Release management is to organize and manage a series of activities related to software and hardware launch, including the formulation of release policies, the formulation of release plans, the design of testing solutions for release content, and the criteria for passing tests, release failure emergency solutions, product release instructions, pre-release user training, etc. That is to say, the management of a product at this stage from the completion of R & D planning to the birth of production belongs to the scope of release management. A release may be a change or a group of changes. For example, an enterprise's ERP system is released four times a year. Each release may include more than 100 maintenance changes. Such release control cannot be managed through the change process.

The organizational structure of release management and change management may be virtual in the enterprise. The managers of release management and change management are usually fixed, its members may be flexibly formed based on different projects. The members of the release management team are usually the core members of the released project, a third-party test team, and O & M management personnel. The change team members are usually composed of change-related technical managers and business managers. They also include availability management, capacity management, service level management, and event management managers, used to review the potential impact or risks of the change.

Therefore, we can find that changes and releases are closely related to the core management processes that control system launch risks. In this sense, "Yin", "Yang" can also be used to describe it !! (Post)