Integrating Service Release Management with Service Solution Design

Web-delivered services such as Web or Cloud services are often made available to users in a fast cadence of releases, taking advantage of the single deployment environment of a centrally controlled service. This enables organizations to bring service enhancements to customers in a timely way and respond quickly to market demands. Organizations use multiple Web-delivered services by one or multiple vendors to compose complex solutions to their business problems in conjunction with standard applications and custom implementation and delivery services. Designing these complex solutions often takes considerable time and multiple new releases of a service and a changed service roadmap may have influence on a customer's solution design. Existing IT service management and software development best practices do not consider the relationship between service release management and service design sufficiently to address frequent releases and changes to a service roadmap. This paper discusses the relationship from both the point of view of the service provider and the service customer and proposes an approach to manage those interdependencies between service design and release management