Exploring Digital Product Release
Summarize
Summary of Exploring Digital Product Release
The ServiceNow® Digital Product Release (DPR) application streamlines the delivery of digital products and services by managing the release process from planning through delivery. It supports release managers, product managers, and program managers in tracking release progress, ensuring adherence to company policies, and facilitating collaboration among stakeholders to monitor release status comprehensively.
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The digital product or service release lifecycle includes phases such as product creation, scope planning, release initiation, execution with task tracking, policy validation, and preparation for deployment by the target release date.
Key Personas
- Release Manager: Manages release calendars, establishes release processes, and oversees policy gates.
- Release Coordinator/Program Manager: Communicates dependencies, approves release scopes, and updates the release team.
- Product Manager: Plans release scopes, initiates releases, and communicates development status.
- Engineering Lead: Ensures development aligns with release scopes.
Key Features
- Release Readiness Targets: Define target dates for single or recurring releases to align teams on deployment readiness.
- Release Templates: Predefined blueprints with phases, tasks, policies, and approval steps to standardize release processes and reduce redundant activities.
- Policy Administration: Automate release workflows through configurable policies to enforce organizational standards.
- Release Planning and Execution: Manage products, services, features, and enhancements; track releases from start to finish.
- Release Calendar: Coordinate multiple release readiness targets while accounting for blackout periods, maintenance windows, and holidays.
- Release Bundles: Group multiple releases to manage dependencies and conflicts, ensuring coordinated delivery.
- Digital Product Release Workspace: Centralized interface for release admins and product managers to define processes, manage products and features, plan scopes, and execute releases.
- Release Dashboards: Visual insights into release progress, risks, and software quality to support informed decision-making.
- Holiday Schedules: Integrate non-working days into release timelines for accurate phase and duration calculations.
Key Concepts
- Approval Definitions: Rules specifying stakeholder approvals required for tasks, supporting accountability and quality checks.
- Included Products: Organize related products and services in hierarchies to understand dependencies and improve management decisions.
- Release Execution: Continuous tracking of release progress ensuring readiness by target dates.
- Stage-Oriented vs. Timeline-Oriented Releases: Stage-oriented releases focus on task completion without fixed phase end dates allowing flexibility; timeline-oriented releases have defined phase end dates suitable for deadline-driven teams.
Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers
By leveraging Digital Product Release, customers can establish consistent, policy-driven release processes that enhance visibility, coordination, and control over complex digital product deliveries. The solution supports efficient planning and execution, reduces manual tracking overhead, and helps ensure releases meet organizational standards and schedules. This leads to improved collaboration among release stakeholders, timely delivery of products and services, and better risk management throughout the release lifecycle.
The ServiceNow® Digital Product Release application enables you to streamline the process of delivering digital products and services by managing the process from planning to delivery.
Digital Product Release overview
Digital Product Release (DPR) is a release management solution that helps release managers, product managers, and program managers manage the release process. They can track the progress of releases while ensuring that the releases adhere to the company's policies.
This solution automates processes that enable collaboration between stakeholders, so everyone can track release status, from start to finish.
Digital Product Release workflow
A digital product or service has a release life cycle that starts with planning, goes through development, and ends with delivery. There are many different phases to a release life cycle, and each phase can have its own set of activities. The following infographic illustrates the life cycle of digital products and services.
- Create a product or service and add features, product enhancements, and releases.
- Plan the scope of a release by moving product enhancements into releases.
- Initiate a release and set its release readiness target date.
- Execute the release by tracking its progress and completing phases and tasks within each phase.
- Validate the release phase against mapped policies to ensure that the release adheres to organizational standards.
- Get the product or service ready by the specified target date to make it available for deployment.
Personas
| Release manager |
|
| Release coordinator or Program manager |
|
| Product manager |
|
| Engineering lead |
|
Digital Product Release benefits
| Benefit | Feature | Users |
|---|---|---|
| Define release readiness targets for single or recurring release schedules. | Release readiness target | Release manager |
| Define release templates that include phases, tasks, policies, and approval tasks. | Release templates | Release manager |
| Create policies to automate the release process. | Policy administration | Release manager |
| Manage products, services, features, product enhancements, versions, and initiate a release. | Release planning | Product manager |
| Plan and manage the release process from start to finish. | Release execution | Release manager |
Digital Product Release key terms
- Approval definition
- An approval definition is a set of rules that specify how tasks will be approved from a set of stakeholders for a release. For example, the QA team might approve code quality or the Security team might approve on the security aspects. An approval for a task can be requested from an individual user or a user group.
- Included products
- Included products help you organize and manage related digital products and services. By creating a product hierarchy using Included products, you can understand the relationships between different products and services and make informed decisions about product management.
- Release bundle
- A release bundle helps you to group multiple releases to track and manage them concurrently from a single place. They also help you to identify dependencies and potential conflicts, and make any necessary adjustments to ensure a smooth and coordinated release process.
- Release execution
- Release execution is a continuous process to track and monitor the progress of a release. It helps you ensure that all products in the release are ready by the release readiness target date.
- Release calendar
- A release calendar helps you group multiple release readiness targets. It can also contain blackout, maintenance, and other user-defined schedules to avoid overlap of release targets on those dates.
- Release readiness target
- A release readiness target is when a release is ready to be released. It helps release managers to determine the dates at which the products and services should be ready for deployment by the team.Note:Release readiness target and Release target are used interchangeably in the documentation and application. Both terms refer to the same concept - release readiness target date.
- Release template
- A release template is like a blueprint for a release process, which includes a predefined set of phases, tasks, policies, and approval tasks.
- Stage-oriented release
- A release that follows a stage-oriented process. This process doesn't have phases with predefined end dates. It is suitable for teams that work toward completing product enhancements and objectives. Teams can move to the next phase after they have completed tasks and met policy compliance for the current phase. Teams have the flexibility to restart any completed phase if they encounter an issue that requires them to go back.
- Timeline-oriented release
- A release that follows a timeline-oriented process. This process has defined end dates for each phase of the release. It is suitable for teams that work toward the planned deadlines and have phases with a specific duration.
- Release planning
- Release planning is an activity to plan a product or service's enhancements into releases to define the scope of work for each release.
The release must be associated with a release readiness target date, which determines the start and end dates for phases and tasks based on the target date.