The first step is to get the organization aligned on a agile delivery cadence that is most appropriate depending on the type of business – more importantly the expectation from your end users. For example, if you are a bank, you would not want to bring down critical customer facing applications during peak business hours, for that matter any time during business hours. So not only do you have to pick your dates, you need to have a clear understand of exactly when during the day you would authorize a release to production. Now, imagine that you have multiple initiatives that you have organized into “project containers”. You have to now release these projects into the production environment in an organized manner, complete with the ability to rollback etc.

In order for you to deliver solutions on an established cadence, your organization must achieve synchronization in solution delivery. This is a key function of release management. As you solve for this in the most lean implementation possible, you have to figure out how to execute this release process daily in the Dev and QA environments, so that you can repeat this any number of times in the production environment at will.

Hence, Enterprise Release Management becomes a key foundation for Release Orientation.