Our release management processes and teams are there to try to protect us from failure and disaster, but when we want to accelerate our velocity, they can seem to get in the way. Current best practices that optimize value streams move toward smaller, autonomous teams who are responsible for every aspect of delivery and risk management. But how can we do that without compromising our governance and introducing risk? Join Helen Beal, a self-described ‘DevOpsologist’ at Ranger4 and Jeff Keyes, VP of Product at Plutora, to learn about: Why autonomous teams and centralized governance can live together; How organizations evolve to release frequently and safely on demand; What happens to release managers in a decentralized model; The technology that supports us in making risk-informed decisions.

1. Keys to
Successful
Cohabitation:
Governance and
Autonomous
Teams

2. PAGE 2
We’ll be answering
questions at the end, but
feel free to add them to
the chat/question box at
any point during the
webinar.
Webinar Flow
• Why autonomous teams and centralized
governance can live together
• How organizations evolve to release
frequently and safely on demand
• What happens to release managers in a
decentralized model
• The technology that supports us in making
risk-informed decisions

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Why autonomous teams and centralized
governance can live together

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A: Because we have big balls of mud AKA spaghetti code
Q: Why do we have release managers anyway?
What customers see
UI
Magic
What engineers see

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Their purpose is to protect us from catastrophic failure
Release managers manage dependencies
I changed something here
Something broke over here

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From Hierarchy to Autonomy
From silos to value stream centric thinking

7. PAGE 7
Regulatory Compliance
13 © 2019 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and its affiliates.
A Difficult Problem - Regulation
3
The number of
external regulations
that DevOps teams
must comply with,
on average
47%
46%
41%
37%
30%
29%
23%
22%
19%
15%
1%
2%
Privacy (eg GDPR)
ISO 27001
FISMA
HIPAA
PCI-DSS
CSF
FERPA
GLBA
Sarbanes Oxley
SOC 2
Other
None
Percent of organisations

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How organizations evolve to release frequently and
safely on demand

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The Direction of Evolution (Throughput)

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The Direction of Evolution (Stability)

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Using DevOps Principles for Value Streams
Evolving Light-Weight Service Management
Activity Current Condition Next Target Condition Long Term Vision
Change CABs
Typifying change,
automating checklists
Teams peer review their
own changes
Release
Release weekends,
calendars & managers automated releases
Teams autonomously
release on demand
Security Pen tests in prod
Automatic scanning
in CI
Checks in IDE
Support 3 tiers
ChatOps, automated
customer feedback
You build it, you own it,
and/or swarming
Incident
War rooms, incident
managers
Healthy retrospectives ChatOps in/across teams
organization transitions from one capability to another.
It uses the lean improvement
long term vision, seek to understand the current condition and identify
the next target condition. Organizations should seek to experiment using
the Deming PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) cycle:
7Service Management in a DevOps World
Things like the Change Advisory Board, that in many organizations
palpable) that add wait times to value streams and are often perceived
to be adding no real value to the customer experience. The change and
release calendars and checklists are often similarly reviled and
not valued.
Painful working practices
related to these are release
weekends and nights, the
a large batch release goes
bad, and project centric
a culture of meetings and
(feast and famine) and
spiralling technical debt.

12. PAGE 12
What happens to release managers in a
decentralized model

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Pick One Answer
ü We’ll fire them all just like we did with the Project Managers
ü We will transition every single one of them into our squads
ü Let’s retrain them all as ScrumMasters
ü We’ll just automate them and redeploy them somewhere else
ü We’ll give them access to all the product backlogs
ü We’ll make them come to all of our daily scrums
Q: What should we do with our Release Managers?

14. PAGE 14
Service Management in a DevOps World
Once the team has proven themselves reliable, they gain a
increase the amount of change they perform outside of th
change process.
Moves to transparency, inspection and adaptation: federating control
The Evolution of a Release Manager
From To
Administrator Advisor and Automator
Blocker Breaking Dependencies
Coordinator Coach and Collaborator
Dictatorial Discoverer
Enforcer Evolver
Gatekeeper Governance Enabler
Focused on dates Focused on value

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Flavors of Release Manager
Production Only End to End Physical
• Teams request slots
• Primary function is scheduling
• Manages conflicts
• Says “yes” or “no”
• May oversee the actual release
• Closely aligned to team
• Has visibility into the team’s
schedule and backlog
• Participates in work planning e.g.
sprint events
• Performs the technical work to
deploy
• May be manual, scripts or a tool
• May be a role embedded in the
team

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What to Do to Safeguard Your Career
Production Only
End to End
Physical
Value Stream Manager
1. Understand the product or service
end to end
2. Coach every pipeline
3. Use metrics to discover
improvements
4. Use tools to gain insights and
optimize
5. Gather (and automate) data for
audits
6. Shift left AND right
ScrumMaster or Portfolio
Manager
Product Owner
Site Reliability Engineer or
Cloud Engineer
There are a number of options open to you

17. PAGE 17
For Which Job
Title Have You
Recently Hired
(Or Are Planning
On Hiring)?
Value Stream Management Jobs and Learning
0 10 20 30 40 50 60
Product Value Stream Lead
Platform Engineer
DevOps Coach
Product Owner
Release Engineer/Manager
Agile Coach
System Administrator
Automation Architect
Test Engineer
ScrumMaster
SRE
Infrastructure Engineer
CICD Engineer
DevOps Consultant
Software Engineer
DevOps Engineer/Manager
%
%

18. PAGE 18
Value Stream Management According to GartnerThis research note is restricted to the personal use of jeff.keyes@plutora.com.
Figure 1. Three Ways Forward for DevOps Toolchains
The three ways forward are not mutually exclusive — they can and will coexist in most

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The spectrum from old to new – the journey takes time
In Transition… Evolution Through Automation
WATERFALL(BigBatch)
AGILE(SmallIncrements)
Manual Automated
Spreadsheets and email,
MS Project and Gantt
charts
Value Stream Mapping
and CICD
Value Stream
Management
Release calendars and
release weekends
Transparency into
backlogs and release
plans
Teams autonomously
release with automated
governance and
continuous compliance
Release dates and
milestones, costs and
budget
Release cadence and
velocity, MTTR
Cycle time and customer
value outcomes
Tools
Process
Metrics

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The technology that supports us in making risk-
informed decisions

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Optimizing the Release Flow
Managing Value Streams
A combination of people, process, and
technology that maps, optimizes,
visualizes, and governs business value
flow (including epics, stories, and work
items) through heterogeneous
enterprise software delivery pipelines.
FORRESTER
(Value Stream Management Definition)

22. PAGE 22
How Plutora Supports Evolution
The Problem The Impact What’s Needed The Plutora Solution
Siloed teams and
tools Scheduling overhead Automated tracking
● Release orchestration planning
of manual and automated tasks.
● Release Schedules / feature
● CD Pipelines
Manual governance
efforts Blockers slow flow Automated governance
● Templatized release plans
● Release tracking and insights
Manual risk
management efforts Risky releasees Automated risk management
● Templatized release plans
● Integrated delivery and quality
metrics
● Impact matrices / calendars
Agile/DevOps change
fundamentals of
delivery
People unlearn Measured progress
● Templatized release plans
● Analytics of application delivery

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Release Management Dashboards
Timed & Planned Deployments
Insights Dashboard

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Release Management Dashboards
Release Status & Risk
Release Types

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Release Management Dashboards
DevOps Metrics
Business Value

26. VSM Imagined:
The Plutora
Platform
DECISION-MAKING & ANALYTICS
MANAGEMENT & ORCHESTRATION
INTEGRATION & COMMON DATA MODEL
Value Stream Mapping
Deep Analytics &
Comparative Metrics
AI-Powered Predictive Insights
VA L U E S T R E A M M A N A G E M E N T P L AT F O R M
Plan
Code /
Build
Verify
Package &
Deploy
Configure
Manage &
Monitor
Audit & Governance Pipeline Oversight & Traceability Real-Time Collaboration
Release Management &
Pipeline Orchestration
Hybrid Environment
Management
Deployment Management &
Orchestration
Tool Integrations Normalized Data Model Converged Toolchains

27. PAGE 27
In conclusion…

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Any questions?

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Complete metrics
for development,
release,
environments and
quality in one place
across the entire
portfolio
Release
Orchestration
APPLICATIONS
ACTIVITY
PROGRESS
ADVANCED
FILTERING
METRICS
TEST
PROGRESS
DEFECTS
ALERTS
OVERDUE
ACTIVITIES
RELEASE HEALTH

30. PAGE 30
Release Management Functionality