Context

IBM Tivoli Release Process Manager (ITRPM) provides a holistic view of a change to an IT service—to facilitate successful deployment in your IT environment. As a productivity tool, ITRPM manages and coordinates simple and complex release tasks to ensure that these tasks are completed in the right order and by the right people. This portal-based solution provides you with an easy-to-use interface that enables fast implementation of a release management process, ready for you to use as is, using a set of best-practice ITSM best practices flows. ITRPM then helps you to coordinate and manage releases throughout the release lifecycle.

ITRPM is an integrated set of systems management tools that enable you to develop your processes at your own pace. ITRPM also includes metrics with ready to use reports focused on key performance indicators (KPIs).

ITRPM can help you better meet customer service level expectations with improved release success rates and fewer business disruptions.

Details

ITRPM includes best-practice workflow templates for coordinating release activities and tasks. Because you might already have well documented and functioning processes in place, the Release Process Manager workflow templates are designed for easy configuration at various levels. Using the underlying ITSM Dynamic Workflow Engine, administrators can tailor existing workflow templates to specific release types by adding or deleting activities and tasks. You can also modify a specific instance of a release workflow for a one-time use.

A built-in lightweight project management capability enables you to schedule activities and tasks, and to sequence them in the proper order of execution. All release schedules can be displayed graphically in a calendar with overall start and end dates.

Releases specific to hardware and software can use existing repositories such as the Definitive Media Library (DML).

You can automate deployment of a release by connecting the implementation activity directly to the operational management product, such as Tivoli Configuration Manager, to perform operational tasks, monitor the status of tasks, and verify completion of tasks. Such connections are made possible and even extensible by means of the integration module (IM) methodology, that is, incorporated into a variety of ITSM process managers.

Releases can be planned and implemented on a predefined schedule or can be ad hoc to support unplanned emergency patches and updates. Each release can address one or more requests for change, to allow for efficient batch implementation.

Releases can also be broken down into rollouts to meet change constraints associated with different departments in your organization. Each rollout can be scheduled according to a service level agreement or other type of agreement.

Obtaining more information

For additional information, contact your IBM Tivoli representative or visit the IBM Tivoli Release Process Manager Web site at: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/tivoli/features/it-serv-mgmt/welcome/itsm-pro-accel.html.