Key Release Management Roles

There are two main roles in the area of Release Management:

Program Release Manager
Release Engineer / Deployment Manager

Program Release Manager

The Program Release Manager is responsible for planning and implementing changes in application services according to release and change management processes. The goal of the release and change management is to provide a disciplined process for introducing required changes into the application with minimal disruption to ongoing operations. A Change Advisory Board (CAB) will be put in place in order to take joint ownership of some of the following tasks:

Facilitate the collection of new business requirements in a structured way
Analyze new requirements, e.g. requests for change (RFC).
Assign a priority and a category to the change after assessing its urgency and its impact on the application service and end users. This assignment affects the speed at which the change will be addressed and the route it takes for authorization.
Prepare time estimations with development lead or development team
Ensure that business case for a change is in place before requesting approval from the governing organization
Plan the deployment of the changes, a process that can vary immensely in scope and includes reviews at key interim milestones
To work with development lead, or when applicable lead the development team, through the design, development and test phases. Work with pperations management during production migration
When applicable, if the Release Manager is assigned with development management responsibility; lead development team in all aspects such as but not limited to: resource planning, work scheduling, technology planning, architecture review and work with the service manager to ensure adequate staffing and resource availability.
Conducting a post-implementation process that reviews whether the change has achieved the goals that were established for it and determines whether to keep the change or back it out.
Prepare and document use cases
Application integration testing
Lead reference team meetings related to new releases
Additional extraordinary accountabilities:
- Develop release and change management processes within the operations team.

Release Engineer / Deployment Manager

Responsible for planning, building and running change procedures for the Salesforce Platform. The focus of the Release Engineer is to ensure that all aspects of change of the platform are addressed operationally. The goal is to provide a disciplined process for controlling, executing and making sure that all required changes into the IT application environment are documented and follow appropriate policies with minimal disruption to ongoing operations.

The Release Engineer designs, develops, implements and manages the procedures including (but not limited to) documentation standards, coding standards, release management processes, naming conventions, source control and, most important, deployments.

Responsible for source and version control tools including their use, function, processes and procedures
Confirmation that what is tested is migrated to production
Agrees scope of the items that are to be controlled and deployed
Ensures that changes to the configuration management methods and processes are properly approved and communicated
Implements the change management plan, following defined processes and appropriate procedures
Manages and communicates all changes that have upstream and downstream impact to appropriate stakeholders
Plans the deployment of the changes, a process that can vary immensely in scope and includes reviews at key interim milestones

Responsibilities

The following matrix shows the different roles, and their responsibilities, needed to run the Release Management processes and procedures.

*Role*	CoE / Stream	Team	Release Mgmt / Deployment Responsibilities
PMO	CoE	Customer	Defines the overall delivery schedule, roadmap, and end user training approach, as well as communication strategy, keeping the project teams and user community in sync.
Program Architect	CoE	Salesforce	Defines the best practices and standards around integration, security, release management and coding standards.
Global Administrator	Support	Customer	Responsible for sandbox creation and proper configuration, AppExchange packages setup, activation of users, permissions, setup delegated admin, user and role data loads, security, features activation, etc.
Program Release Manager	Release	Customer	See description above
Release Engineers	Release	Customer	Responsible for the life cycle of Change Requests and deploying any changes to Prod The Release Engineer packages the implementation of a release in Git, merges with upstream work, resolves conflicts, coordinates tasks with the development team, maintains a pre/post deployment checklist and deploys to other sandboxes.

Skills required for Salesforce Release Management

We strongly advise that the persons running this process are experienced in both the Git Branching Model as well as in Salesforce (both as developer and administrator). The Salesforce certifications required are:

Salesforce Certified Administrator
Salesforce Certified Platform Developer I
Salesforce Certified Development Lifecycle and Deployment Designer

Hands-on experience with a source control tool is also mandatory.

Regarding the Git Branching Model and how to use it together with the Salesforce CLI, there are many articles and tutorials available. We suggest the following: