Case study 01 · Release governance
Getting a fragmented release process under control
A multi-team SAP landscape where changes arrived unplanned, transports conflicted, and nobody could state with confidence what was going live on Thursday.
Anonymised — reconstructed from missions listed in my CV. No client document, figure or outcome is disclosed.
Business contextSeveral SAP streams — functional, Basis, integration — released on their own cadence into a shared transport landscape. Change requests were tracked in two tools at once, and the weekly release had become a negotiation rather than a schedule.
Challenges
- No single source of truth for what was in a release
- Conflicting transport requests discovered at import time
- Go/No-Go decisions taken without documented evidence
- Business teams informed late, then surprised
My responsibilitiesRelease management: owning the calendar, the governance rules and the readiness evidence.
MethodologyA single release calendar entering every stream, frozen windows announced a month ahead, a change validation gate with explicit entry criteria, and a Go/No-Go pack assembled from evidence rather than opinion.
Deliverables
- Release calendar (rolling, per stream)
- Governance framework: CAB rules, RACI, escalation
- Go/No-Go decision pack
- Readiness KPI dashboard
Business valueReleases stopped being an argument. The calendar gave every stream the same deadline, the gate caught conflicting transports before import rather than during it, and the Go/No-Go pack turned a meeting into a decision.