Release and Deployment

An ITSM narrative

Daniel McLean

• Publisher: IT Governance Publishing
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781849287791
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Computer Science

Deploying releases into production is fraught with difficulty

With so many interested constituencies, processes can go wrong in more ways than they can go right. The problems start when requirements are gathered and, if unmanaged, can flow unchecked through the entire process, potentially delivering something that's bound to fail while, paradoxically, exactly meeting the specification.

In Release and Deployment: An ITSM Narrative Account, we follow the story of the release & deployment process in fictional form.

Product overview

Chris has got a new job as a release manager – but he's struggling. Parachuted into a large company to fix its release & deployment process after the catastrophic failure of its new app, Asgard, he finds himself battling an array of insular department heads who are all determined that whatever has gone wrong must be another team's fault. They all want the finger of blame pointed elsewhere, and Chris seems to be the perfect target – so they shout down his questions and suggestions as insubordination.

How can he pacify his new colleagues, avoid getting fired and get the job done?

Lessons from real projects in a narrative format

This latest ITSM narrative from Daniel Mclean explains the common pitfalls of release & deployment in fictional form, with each chapter describing a difficult meeting with a different department head and featuring a set of pointers that our hero would have found beneficial.

Based on the real-life experience of the author and other ITSM practitioners, Release and Deployment: An ITSM Narrative Account exposes the potential pitfalls and explores how to handle the issues that come with such projects, all in the face of shifting organisational structures and changing management objectives.

Contents

• Winning The Job
• Where Did My Job Go?
• Finance – Wisdom or Indifference?
• Bad Beginnings
• Requirements – Voice of the Business
• Sales – Heart of the Business
• Application Development
• Infrastructure – Physical Clouds
• QA – Guardians of the Gates
• Management Intervention
• Change Management – Short Circuit
• Release – Let Slip the Dogs of War
• Deploy – The End of the Beginning

About the author

Daniel McLean is an ITSM consultant with over 20 years' experience in IT. He has spent the last ten years designing, implementing and operating processes supporting ITSM. He was also a peer reviewer during development of the OGC ITIL v3 Service Strategy Best Practice.

Daniel McLean's other ITSM narrative accounts are also available from IT Governance.

CHAPTER 1: WINNING THE JOB

Megan rubbed her fingertips against each other, giving the impression she was either praying for guidance or contemplating her prey. She took a slow, very deliberate breath and paused. As the silence filled the room, her smile made it clear she was looking for a victim, not guidance. And it was my bad luck to be the quarry sitting across the desk from her.

I was tired of job hunting. It had been almost four months since Jessica, my boss at the last company, was forced out in some smooth manipulations by a few other directors. Apparently they were jostling for a soon to be announced VP vacancy and she was just the first casualty in what became a sharp-elbowed conflict for supremacy. It was not unusual, just what goes on at that level in most big companies. What I found perplexing was that every time I saw it, the company’s senior leadership was well aware of what was happening. They knew it did nothing for the stockholders or the customers, yet stayed out of it and almost encouraged it. Perhaps it was because that is how they all rose to their positions. Or maybe it was their way to determine who had what it takes to work at their level. I’d probably never get the chance to find out.

Once Jessica had been ousted, the other directors created systematic cases to clean out her entire team, regardless of their individual performance. This scorched earth behavior was very standard behavior and they were very efficient at it. About the only thing they didn’t do was to salt the earth and conduct some sort of ritual public mutilation.

And of course I was one they pushed out after Jessica.

The job market was still weak in this part of the country, so being forced out of a company was definitely a career threatening situation. I knew there were a lot of candidates for each job in the area. All of them reasonably qualified so it was hard to go wrong. It was just the way employers liked it, because it kept the staff quiet and obsequious. Networking was the only way to find a position and even then you had to stand out from the rest in some unique way. But when almost your entire network is out of work too, it doesn’t help you a lot.

Megan leaned across her desk. Her words snapped me back to the interview.

“Tell me, Chris. What makes you more appropriate for this position than the other people I’ve talked to this week? Why should I take a chance on you”? Then she glanced at her watch and huffed as if she were behind schedule and had three more people waiting outside her office for interviews.

I sat silently for a moment, composing an answer that wouldn’t sound like, “Because I’m the best you are going to see and you’d be a fool not to hire me. Release may not be my career aspiration, but I’ve done this before and am so over-qualified for this role that I can do it standing on my head while holding my breath.”

But after all the interviews I’d had over the last couple of months, I knew that would be unwise, unless I was looking to cut the interview very short. I started to speak, but with the exquisite timing of a chess grandmaster, she cut me off.

“Let me put it differently. I just don’t understand why you would even consider applying for this job. You’d be bored to tears in a week. I mean, after all, you have an amazing background. You must know so much more about the release and implementation of apps than anyone else here…even me, and I’ve been through one of those ‘All-Told’ fundamental classes for IT services.”

I mentally winced at her apparent lack of awareness and understanding.Perhaps this was a test to see if I knew what she was talking about and how, or would, I correct her.

Megan leaned back in her chair, looking oh so contented with her questioning. It was a well-structured inquiry. It was seemingly simple at first glance, but full of complex nuance just below the surface. She had put me in a position where defending my skills would give her a reason to reject me, while down-playing them would also give her a reason to reject me.

I’d researched Megan thoroughly and been lucky enough to discover leadership had parachuted her into this role straight from her work overseeing construction of solutions by the development teams. She’d been incredibly successful building tools, but had little experience in making them useful. I guessed that leadership was testing her with this assignment. This mundane role couldn’t be her dream position. She probably viewed it as a way to show that she was the company’s next golden child and not some one-hit wonder. My sense was that she was trying to break out of IT and into the business side of the house…the place where all the advancement, glory and money resided. She seemed experienced enough to know that if she brought me in and I failed as release manager, it would be viewed as a negative on her. And in the hyper-competitive world of director and above, even something as mundane as a bad hire into a key area could be enough to hold you back… if she were lucky enough to keep her job.

I didn’t want her to be threatened by me, but at the same time I wanted her to feel I would have no problem executing the role, and I would present little risk to her career if she hired me. Despite her display of ignorance illustrated through her personal training comment, I didn’t need her to know what I knew to succeed. But it was important to her ego that she thought she did. She needed to feel comfortable that I was not a threat to her or her success. And that was her mistake. Managers, who insist they know just as much, if not more than everyone who works for them, are never very effective.

The good news was that people who get parachuted into a situation by leadership almost never have any expectation of having a career in that role. They simply see it as a way to show leadership how good they are at producing results and reinforcing the common mistake weak leadership can make…namely that a good manager can manage anything, regardless of their background. Once she had reinforced leadership’s preconceptions of the world, they would move her to the next crisis and to become their go-to warrior…at least until she stumbled. Then they would replace her with their next superhero with a cape. To them, she was expendable proof of their superior vision and understanding of the business. After all, they were senior leaders because they possessed those attributes, and anyone whose performance called that into question was clearly substandard and needed to be replaced. Failing to confirm and reinforce that was a sign of a failed superhero, not a gap in leadership assumptions. I’d always found that to be nearly hilarious…only in a company could the idea flourish that when reality doesn’t agree with preconceived assumptions, clearly reality is wrong and will be ignored until it corrects itself and aligns with their assumptions.

I struggled to keep wearing my best poker face and reminded myself that people who become senior leadership have some superb insights that we could all benefit from. So I followed the example of many great leaders by answering the question I wanted to answer, not the one Megan had asked.

Shaking my head slightly, I broke eye contact for a moment and looked up at the ceiling. That was an okay kinesthetic. Looking down would have been a disaster. After a moment of silence to encourage her to think she’d thrown me off balance, I looked straight at her, gave a slightly exaggerated sigh and said, “You know, Megan, it is really very sad. Fortunately, the fact that I am here talking to you makes it clear your company gets it. It is tragic so few companies do.”

Her mouth parted slightly, as if to speak, but no words came immediately out. A response that jerked the conversation in a different direction by letting me frame my response from a, “can’t win”to a, “can’t lose”path was not what she had expected. But I was determined to stand out and show her I could play the interview game as well as any.

I pressed the palms of my hands together in front of my face for a moment, before putting my hands palms-down on the desk and leaning a little closer across the desk. Not close enough to violate her personal space, but just enough to make her feel I was very serious…that I was sharing a deep insight with her…that I was giving her a special and perhaps even secret message. I lowered the register and volume of my voice. Slowly shaking my head back and forth I said, “The transition of projects into production is where so many companies stumble and so much great development work is wasted.”

I sat back a little in my chair. “I’m sure you’ve seen it before. Uncountable hours of hard work designing, building and testing a brilliant solution, and then when it’s time to bring it to life for your customers, it all falls apart at their first touch and no one appears responsible. It falls apart not because anything has changed about the solution. It falls apart because of how the solution is developed, moved into the live environment and integrated with all the other applications.”

I slowly shook my head. “It’s tragic. That’s why I was so excited to see that your senior leadership understood the dynamics and was determined to avoid that happening again by putting someone with your strengths and background in charge of putting the team in place to manage the solution. That’s the kind of executive vision and commitment that inspires us all.”

I looked up and straight at her. “Don’t you agree”? Sometimes a thematic non-answer beats a content rich response.

She nodded, and for the first time in our interview, that smirky smile of power was nowhere to be found on her face.

“Yes,” she stumbled, not wanting to sound like she thought senior leaders were making a mistake. Then swallowing hard to regain her composure and show me how insightful she was, she nodded and said, “I’ve seen it too, of course.” After a brief pause, she added a weak face-saving, “At other firms, of course. That’s why I agreed to this role, this opportunity to build a team to rescue the company from a faulty process.”

I cut her off before she could continue. You had to be careful with thematic answers. Sometimes they induce the other person to ramble around and around your statement, endlessly confirming it. One of the pieces of interview coaching I’d received from my mentors was to always try to turn the interview around, so that they’re trying to impress you, not the reverse. “Yes. I could tell you understood the situation. It was very clear from your line of questions in this interview. Your leadership vision made you want to ensure it would be covered for this role by over-hiring the skill set and not relying on someone who only met the minimum qualifications.”

By the way she nodded and smiled it was clear she was aligning with me.

She responded with, “That’s why they put me in this role…to get the right set of resources and processes in place to ensure we can support the needs of the business.”

“Have you begun any efforts to establish a process to make things work better”? I moved the interview away from me to a tactical review of how she was currently addressing the issue, so the focus of our conversation became my reviewing her actions so far, rather than her trying to find a reason to knock me out of the competition.

I already knew the answer because I had done enough research and networked with enough former employees to know that the transition of bright and shiny projects into customer solutions was consistently a train wreck here. And despite the oblique wording of the posting for the position opening, it was clear they didn’t have a solution and probably not the will to fix it, even if they knew what the solution should be. That’s the role they were really interviewing me for, even though the official position title was, “Project Manager.”

That didn’t bother me. Almost every company I knew had the same problem. Leadership was always overly impressed with activity, but the grunt work of making it operational and successfully transitioning it into a means of adding value, was too mundane to hold the interest of leadership for extended periods. They just wanted it fixed.

What many missed was that the real value was not in the production of the application itself. There was a lot of incredible work by highly talented people to create something that was often amazing. The teams that made that happen deserved credit and reward for their efforts. But the ultimate value went back to the real purpose of IT – to increase through partnership and technical leverage, the capability of the business to achieve their goals. If we weren’t doing that, as far as the company was concerned, we were simply consuming oxygen and reducing the occurrence of rust in the building.

I had a simple question. If they wanted someone to help build a way to successfully integrate projects into the customer’s world, why hadn’t they been more direct about it. Either they really had no idea of what or how to do it, or there was someone on the grey organization chart who had the job and was failing but hadn’t been removed because they had a lot of pull on the grey chart.

Every organization has a formal organization chart as well as a grey chart. The formal chart is the one they show to people and use to give titles. The grey chart is where the real power lies. It’s a roadmap to whose voice rings the loudest. The reason so many people struggle with the grey chart is that it is never written down. There are no records and no documents to investigate. The only way you know what it looks like is by paying close attention to the relationship dynamics between people independent of title. If you are lucky a mentor or friend may share what they have learned with you. No one ever seems to know all of the grey chart, only sections of it, and the grey chart is in a constant state of flux. But the more you know, the more you can impact how the company works.

By the time we got to the end of the interview, I was almost confident Megan would recommend hiring me. The way she talked it seemed more like she was selling me on the company than I was selling her on me. It felt really good.

“I was wondering who my direct manager would be in this role? It is a little unusual to get to this point in the interview process and not meet them, or even know who it would be.”

She nodded. “We are still structuring the role in the organization. We needed to see the skills and experience of the best candidate before we decided how and where they would fit on the team.”

“Oh…” That sounded like cover for leadership indecision or fighting over reqs.

“But I think that if you are the right person for this opportunity, with your background and experience, moving forward…rather if we decide to move forward, it makes more sense for you to report directly to me.”

I tried to cover my surprise and pleasure at the idea of working directly for a senior leader like Megan, especially one who knew very little and would therefore let me set my own agenda, as long as it advanced her career and position amongst her peers.

By the time I was in the parking lot, I was convinced the job was mine. I made a mental note to make sure everything was in order outside work. I hoped to start this new job quickly because I really needed the money and I wanted to give it my all, especially in the beginning. I knew that a good 90 day halo would stick with you for years if it was strong enough.

Two weeks later, I had a signed sweet job offer and a start date. This was going to be good.

Knowledge that would have helped Chris

• You will often find your immediate boss may not be able to do your job, even if their career depended on it. Remember that is why they hired you. They were smart enough to hire someone who knew a lot more than they did. If you find yourself w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface
• About The Author
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Winning The Job
• Chapter 2: Where Did My Job Go?
• Chapter 3: Finance – Wisdom or Indifference?
• Chapter 4: Bad Beginnings
• Chapter 5: Requirements – Voice of the Business
• Chapter 6: Sales – Heart of the Business
• Chapter 7: Application Development
• Chapter 8: Infrastructure – Physical Clouds
• Chapter 9: QA – Guardians of the Gates
• Chapter 10: Management Intervention
• Chapter 11: Change Management – Short Circuit
• Chapter 12: Release – Let Slip the Dogs of War
• Chapter 13: Deploy – The End of the Beginning
• ITG Resources