It has been a few days since my last post, well more like a week. I have been preoccupied with my current project. It has been quite demanding on my time and therefore I have been neglected a few other aspects of my life, this blog being one. Interestingly enough the project relates to my current series of posts. Of course, this does not really surprise me, after all every development project will have to deal with these concepts in some way.

My current assignment involves reviewing recent changes to an organization’s deployment process that affect ongoing application projects. They are updating the way they build and deploy environments and the application deployment process to said environment. As a result individual application project teams have been building their application deployment assets to an inaccurate set of requirements.

This is a common problem. My involvement includes the assessment of assumed responsibilities around deployment. More specifically, the deployment tasks that the infrastructure and application teams have currently planned for, determine unplanned deployment tasks and recommend a solution to fill the gap. Sounds easily and the process itself is not a difficult one. The challenge lies in the people themselves. You see, there are many different parties involved in a situation like this.

· The project team tasked with building the environment,
· the project team or teams tasked with building the application,
· management, and
· interested parties that have a stake in building company policy.

In this case, there happen to be two applications, one that depends on the functionality of the other, that must be deployed into this new environment and a situation like this will always have a very tight and demanding timeline. No one realized there was a gap in responsibly and the realization normally occurs when the deployment “Go Live” date is staring back at you.

Anyway, the project has reaffirmed my belief that a strong deployment process has many advantages. I will be outlining my thoughts around deployment in the near future but I will publish my thoughts around a build process first as you cannot tackle your deployment until you have a build to target.

Of course, strong communication between team members, dependent projects, management, and company policy teams is necessary for any organization. The consequences of mismanagement in this area will always create major obstacles for any project.