Experiencing the dreaded production application release day? Feel that your reputation or your job may be at risk? Uncertain if you will meet your business team’s expectations? You may be experiencing FORD (not the car company, but rather Fear of Release Day)! What can be done to reduce fear, possible anxiety, or the need to update your resume before the application is released? The answer is not in a pharmaceutical solution, but in how you get everyone on board for the pending application release.
Whether it is a major update or an entirely new application, good planning will always be the right recipe. Two key components that will improve that recipe are authorization to operate (ATO) and early life support (ELS). ATO refers to a rather simple approach to ensuring everyone agrees with the production intent. In its most basic interpretation, ATO is the document used to obtain sign-off from all the key stakeholders. From the business stakeholders, signing the ATO indicates they understand the features, understand the risk, understand the length of time the release cycle may take, etc. From the quality assurance team, signing the ATO indicates they have performed all the functional, performance testing, and have certified the application meets or exceeds predefined expectations. From the security team, signing the ATO indicates they have conducted their reviews, possibly conducted penetration tests, etc., and have certified the application meets their requirements.
Good, right? Not quite, as your team may still experience issues after the production release. This is where the companion document, ELS, will help. Rather than assuming everyone knows there could be issues with a new release, plan the reaction and support with an ELS.
ELS, if done correctly, sets the stage for IT and business teams to respond to issues/problems encountered after the go-live date. In short, the ELS plan establishes the criteria levels to scale down the support teams. As an example, you may assume three levels of issues/problems, such as critical, moderate, and nice-to-have (enhancements). Critical issues may require both IT and business teams to address the problem quickly. From IT, critical issues may require the development staff, testing staff, operations, etc. — all of whom need to be able to drop all other efforts to address the issue. Moderate problems may not need that sense of urgency, allowing those teams to work on them alongside other projects. The last category of issues may require the least effort and expectations for implementation should correspond. The ELS sets the expectation that while the development team (and others) may go onto other projects, they are not released from this project until the level of critical issues diminishes and/or some time has passed where no new critical issues have surfaced.
ATO and ELS coupled together will reduce the stress level of new project releases and will help the business teams understand the effort behind getting a project through a release cycle. Don’t let Fear Of Release Day get you!
Dan Kempton is the Sr. IT Advisor at North Carolina Department of Information Technology. An accomplished IT executive with over 35 years of experience, Dan has worked nearly equally in the private sector, including startups and mid-to-large scale companies, and the public sector. His Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Computer Science fuel his curiosity about adopting and incorporating technology to reach business goals. His experience spans various technical areas including system architecture and applications. He has served on multiple technology advisory boards, ANSI committees, and he is currently an Adjunct Professor at the Industrial & Systems Engineering school at NC State University. He reports directly to the CIO for North Carolina, providing technical insight and guidance on how emerging technologies could address the state’s challenges.
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