on - edited on by
Steph Morillo
Are you challenged with the need to increase release velocity while minimizing risk and maintaining compliance? You are not alone!
We are pleased to introduce our new IT release management application, Digital Product Release (“DPR”), now generally available as a part of the Washington release and the latest addition to the ITSM Pro product suite. DPR aims to 1) provide the benefits of release governance while minimizing the headaches governance often brings and 2) provide E2E visibility and traceability into what is released. With DPR, we give IT the tools and controls to empower their product teams, whether centralized or decentralized, to plan and deliver new versions of products consistently.
Our customers are in a state of flux when it comes to enterprise governance. It is becoming less common for IT to have a “command-and-control” forceful hand, and we are seeing customers evolve to a more “trust but verify” form of governance. With this shift, customers must adapt to enable their increasingly federated teams to have that “digital contract” with IT to drive resilience and compliance.
How does this apply to release management specifically? The traditional method of release management revolves around a project-based way of working – where application features are bundled together and released together as a part of a large release package that is managed and validated by a central release team. This traditional method can lead to inefficiencies, such as arduous governance and repetitive administration, that not only slows down the rate of releases, but also can challenge scalability as products increase in number and complexity. As organizations modernize and adopt more agile and DevOps practices, release management has evolved from this traditional, project-based, way of working to a product-based way of working. Now we are observing:
- An increasing number of federated, autonomous teams planning, building, testing, and deploying products on a more iterative, frequent basis
- Central release teams focusing on defining the right guardrails to support/enable product teams to get their work released in a compliant manner
While this shift in release has numerous benefits (e.g., faster pace of releases, quicker feedback, enhanced ability to pivot), it also comes with its own set of challenges, such as loss of visibility into what is being released, product teams unaware of what constitutes release readiness, and need to automate manual release validation activities.
Enter Digital Product Release. DPR is a release process orchestrator, enabling product teams to plan and deliver new versions of products by providing visibility into the release process and automating the validation of “release readiness” with minimal overhead. The key word here is orchestrator; DPR does NOT encompass capabilities to do the building, testing, or actual deployment of a product – what it does do is tie release phases together as the layer validating when a product is ready to progress from one phase to the next via policy checks.
Through the use of release policies (gates to move from one phase to the next) and templates (how release admins can define the release process for teams to follow), DPR will “shift left” the readiness and compliance checks historically done as a part of a change, just before code was moved to production, and instead perform these checks in the relevant release phase they occur in. This will:
- Reduce the propensity for fire drills when issues are found at the last hour
- Simplify changes so that they only need to validate DPR has certified a release and only focus on checks that should happen in a change (service availability, critical outages, change freezes, etc.).
The core outcomes that DPR will provide are summarized below.
Check out this demo overview video to get an understanding of our Washington GA capabilities.
Double clicking into some of those key capabilities:
- Release Policies – automated, data-driven validation checks that leverage data from within ServiceNow and 3rd party tool integrations; they are our automated “gates” that deem when a release is ready to progress from one phase to the next
- Tasks – manual validation activities that a human must perform across release phases
- Approval definitions – both static and dynamic approval definitions that can be associated to tasks
- Release templates – reusable, fit-for-purpose templates (release phases, durations, policies, tasks) for release administrators to define and product teams to use when executing a release
- Release calendar & readiness targets – experience to define release readiness target (go-no-go) dates and ability to view and modify on a calendar
- External tool integrations – OOTB DPR will support integrating with many 3rd party planning, orchestration, artifact, testing, and security tools and use that incoming data via the DevOps data model
- Change requests – once code is validated and ready to move from one environment to the next, change requests can be created directly from DPR and will automatically link product and software version information for traceability
Some key planned capabilities post-GA:
- Management of hierarchical product releases & dependencies
- Release activity orchestration
- Enhanced integration with Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM)
- Migration tools to DPR from Release Management v2
- GenAI enhancements
We look forward to you trying the application and are excited to see your feedback!
To learn more check out these useful links, or post your questions directly on the DPR Community Forum:
- DPR Getting Started video series
- Digital Product Release Launch & Learn series
- DPR Implementation Bootcamp
- Digital Product Release FAQ
Forward statement disclaimer: Any statement that is not purely historical is considered a forward-looking statement. Forward-looking statements included in this repository are based on information available to ServiceNow as of the date they are made, and ServiceNow assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements. The forward-looking product roadmap does not represent a commitment, guarantee, obligation or promise to deliver any product or feature, or to deliver any product and feature by any particular date and is intended to outline the general development plans. Customers should not rely on this roadmap to make any purchasing decision.
