Building Strong Foundations for Change Enablement and Release Management

by Chrissy Clements // Last updated on January 28, 2025  

Change Enablement And Release Management

Key Highlights

  • Learn the difference between change enablement and release management.
  • Discover how to use Atlassian tools for process improvement.
  • Understand how to eliminate bottlenecks for faster releases.
  • Explore environment management with Apwide Golive.

In 2021, I worked with a team facing significant delays in their journey to production. These delays affected their ability to deliver new features and improvements on time, ultimately hindering business agility and customer satisfaction. After conducting interviews and workshops, the problem was clear: delivering new product features and improvements was taking too long.

To uncover the root cause, I facilitated a "Five Whys" exercise. Here’s what I discovered:

  • Why was it taking too long to deliver new features? The process had too many stage gates and rules, which slowed things down.
  • Why were there so many stage gates and rules? Historical issues led to tighter restrictions.
  • Why did historical issues result in tighter restrictions? The platform was experiencing instability.
  • Why was the platform unstable? Significant technical debt had accumulated.
  • Why did technical debt accumulate? The platform lacked a clear roadmap, and proper planning was not in place.

This analysis revealed inefficiencies, deep-rooted technical issues, and a lack of clear planning. These factors contributed to bottlenecks and excessive overhead, ultimately slowing the delivery of business-critical features.

Change Enablement vs Release Management Confusion

Another challenge was the confusion between "change enablement" and "release management." Though related, these represent distinct practices in service management. A lack of understanding about the distinction led to unclear ownership and fragmented workflows, causing delays, inefficiencies, and increased risk.

Although we’ve defined "release management" in detail in a previous article, here's a quick recap.

According to ITIL:

  • Change Enablement ensures risks are properly assessed and authorizes changes to proceed.
  • Release Management focuses on making new and changed services available for use.
  • Deployment Management moves new or changed components to live environments.

Despite these challenges, the team had already adopted parts of the Atlassian ecosystem. However, they lacked a solid foundation to build on.

The Strategy: Building a Strong Foundation

As part of my vision and strategy, I recommended conducting a DevOps capability assessment to address these challenges. This assessment focused on key practices such as infrastructure as code, automated testing, and CI/CD pipelines which are necessary for improving delivery speed, quality, and reliability.

While the Platform Foundation Team, formed independently of my strategy, implemented some of these capabilities, my strategy provided an overarching framework to integrate these practices into a cohesive and effective operational model.

Another key element of this strategy was the effective use of tools.

Resolving the Challenges with Atlassian

I focused on better utilizing the existing tools to create an efficient workflow and enhance collaboration. The goal was to reduce bottlenecks, improve visibility and ensure transparency throughout the process.

Key tools included:

  • Confluence, Jira, GitKraken & Jira Service Management

Key Features:

  • Release Hub: A central view that tracks the status, blockers, and scope of release candidates, ensuring alignment on timelines and deliverables.
  • Plans: An aggregated timeline of all releases across teams.
  • Request for Change (RFC): Centralized and standardized approvals, speeding up the process and ensuring compliance.
  • Services: Assist with automating change approvals, risk assessments, and searching for schedule conflicts.
  • Change Calendar: A centralized view in Jira Service Management to help teams proactively plan and avoid conflicts.
  • Confluence Calendar: Displaying proposed releases and scheduled changes for improved stakeholder visibility.

Highlighting these features and their benefits helped me drive the team towards reduced approval delays and increased transparency, enabling teams to deliver faster while maintaining control and stability.

Jira Plans - An Aggregated Timeline Of All Releases Across Teams.

Jira Plans - An aggregated timeline of all releases across teams.

Managing Environments

Another wishlist item is improving environment management. While this challenge remains unaddressed, exploring tools like Apwide Golive could be a practical next step.

Apwide Golive provides a centralized view of environments with real-time insights into their status, availability, and usage. Key features include:

  • Booking and tracking environment status (e.g., "Available" or "In Use").
  • Identifying and addressing potential conflicts early.
  • Linking environments to releases, test cycles, or projects within Jira to enhance coordination and planning.
  • Supporting release scheduling and maintaining an audit trail of changes.
  • Customizable dashboards for monitoring metrics relevant to team needs.

This marketplace app has the potential to simplify environment management, minimize conflicts, and improve overall coordination across teams.

Apwide Golive - Environment Scheduling Timeline

Apwide Golive - Environment Scheduling Timeline

Empowerment Through Simplicity and DevOps

Empowering the team through training and autonomy was essential. With the right tools, knowledge, and accountability, teams took ownership of the release process. This shift from rigid processes to more flexible, outcome-focused approaches fostered collaboration and accelerated delivery while maintaining high-quality standards.

The Outcome and Lessons Learned

The results were clear: improved speed of delivery and more reliable processes.

Key outcomes included:

  • Increased Throughput: Simplified practices and better visibility reduced delays and bottlenecks, allowing teams to release faster and more efficiently.
  • More Reliable Change Categorization: Aligning change enablement with ITIL principles led to better categorizing of changes (normal, emergency, and standard), which improved decision-making and reporting.
  • Adoption of Standard Changes: Encouraging teams to adopt standard changes reduced unnecessary complexity and sped up the release process.
Traffic Light Guidance - Change Enablement

Traffic Light Guidance - Image adapted from the Atlassian practice guide

These improvements made the release process more predictable, allowing teams to deliver faster without sacrificing stability. Adopting ITIL terminology, such as "change enablement," fostered a common understanding and better team collaboration.

Key Takeaways

  • Simplify practices to eliminate bottlenecks: Easy approval workflows and clearer roles allowed teams to focus on high-priority work. 
  • Improve transparency and collaboration with the right tools: Integrating Jira, GitKraken, Jira Service Management, Microsoft Teams, and Confluence created a transparent system of work where teams could access real-time data.
  • Empower teams with autonomy and accountability: Providing the right tools and knowledge allowed teams to take ownership, improving delivery speed and quality.

This approach resulted in better efficiency, planning, and collaboration, enabling the team to deliver faster. However, service management isn’t a "set and forget" initiative; continuous improvement is indispensable to meet evolving business demands.

Are your practices agile enough to evolve with your business needs, or are they slowing you down?

About the author

Chrissy Clements

With over 20 years in IT and 15 years in service management, Chrissy is an ITIL-accredited Strategic Leader and an Atlassian Community Leader. Renowned for optimizing practices and driving strategic transformations, Chrissy helps organizations achieve efficient and sustainable service delivery.

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  1. Great insights, Chrissy! I appreciate the focus on DevOps practices like CI/CD and infrastructure as code. Highlighting Atlassian tools for transparency and collaboration is spot-on. The 'Five Whys' approach is a great reminder to address root causes first.

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