Executive Commitment to Change Process
I've just completed interviews with11 top performing IT organziations to look for common change, configuration, and release practices that are responsible for performance breakthrough.
One of the common themes that emerged from these interviews was that most of the organizations had made an executive level decision to define and enforce a change and release process. In many organizations, this was part of an end-to-end process that integrated the SW development lifeycyle with project requests, development, QA and test, build, and release into production environement.
The key point is that these organizations made a strategic decision to identify, document, and follow a defined process reated to how changes are introduced into the production environment. AND, the executive level commitment included an overall package of executive level words and actions that confered accoutnability and consequences.
Some of the common activities of these top performing organziations include regular communications of following the change/release process as an orgnizational priority, monitoring performance measures and results, investigating process exceptions, clearly defining and separating roles and responsibilities, and changing evaluation and promotion criteria to include process adherence.
Many organizations indicated that they have had a change process for years, but that just recently, they have worked to increase the rigor of the process. I sense that the IT industry is "getting religion" and more and more companies are carefully managing how changes are introduced into the production environement.
The obvious question I'll answer in my next post, is "Does that data show that organizations that have an effective change/release process have better results?".
The answer may suprise you...