How do I put some meat onto my Release Process?

I look after the merging, deployment and release of Products & Services in the Company I work for. I've slowly moved to this position from development so a lot of this is new to me (I guess!)

We have a deployment process, but no real Release procedure other than telling stakeholders and members of staff about these new services/features/bug fixes shortly b开发者_如何学编程efore release.

I've heard things about ITIL Release Management, CMDB, versioning and other mumbo jumbo, but are they actually needed or am I going to end up being weighted down in by a load of crap.

The question I guess I'm trying to ask is: what's my first step? Am I making a mountain out of a molehill? How do I shape this department?

Steve

In my opinion following ITIL practices or implementing a CMDB are not necessary but best practices. The most important thing, and first step, in your case, is developing or documented sound processes about what you do. For documentation you can use "programmer friendly" tools like a wiki (MediaWiki, TikiWiki), but if you do not document your practices it is very difficult to implement continual improvement.

If you have already implemented and documented your processes you can study standards and best practices related to your department. ITIL and ISO 20000-1 are standards focused on the quality of services you offer. Services, not ongoing operations. ITIL can provide you with some useful (but not necessary) good practices like implementing a CDMB. If you implement a CMDB correctly your department will have in a database the configuration of the assets you use to provide your services. You will be able to store the configuration of the systems on your clients or what you want. The CMDB can associate its elements with incidents or known errors so the support department could provide the best service to your clients.

CMMI or CRUM are other standards/frameworks that will probably interest you.

About versioning, I think some sort of versioning is a must. GIT or Subversion are good options.

Other tools very interesting in my opinion is some kind of continuous integration, like Jenkins and some ticketing system like Trac or Mantis.