How do you use change and release management feedback to improve?

1 Define your feedback goals

Before you collect and analyze feedback, it is important to define what you want to achieve. Consider the KPIs and metrics that you use to measure the success of your change and release management processes, and how they align with your business objectives and customer expectations. Common feedback goals for change and release management include reducing incidents caused by changes, increasing speed and frequency of delivering changes to production, enhancing the quality and reliability of changes and releases, improving satisfaction and trust of stakeholders, customers, and users, as well as identifying gaps and opportunities for improvement in your change and release management processes. Defining your feedback goals will help you focus on relevant feedback that can help you achieve them.

2 Collect feedback from multiple sources

Feedback from various sources can provide a comprehensive and balanced view of your change and release management performance and impact. Sources of feedback include change and release management reports and dashboards that show the status, progress, and results of your changes and releases. Incident and problem management records can track the incidents and problems related to your changes and releases. Service level management agreements and reports can monitor the availability, performance, and quality of your services after changes and releases. Additionally, stakeholder and customer surveys and interviews measure their satisfaction, expectations, and perceptions of your changes and releases. Lastly, user feedback tools and platforms capture their feedback, ratings, and reviews of your services after changes and releases.

3 Analyze feedback for insights and trends

Once you have collected feedback, analyzing it for insights and trends can help you improve your change and release management processes and outcomes. To do this, you can use data visualization and analytics tools to create charts, graphs, and dashboards to display your feedback data. Additionally, root cause analysis techniques can help identify the underlying causes of the issues and problems related to your changes and releases. Pareto analysis techniques can prioritize the most significant and frequent feedback issues and problems. And SWOT analysis techniques can assess the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your change and release management processes. By analyzing feedback in this way, you can discover patterns, correlations, and gaps in your change and release management performance and impact.

4 Implement feedback for improvement

After analyzing feedback, it is essential to implement it for improvement. To do so, you can rely on various methods and tools, such as change and release management plans and policies that set standards, procedures, and roles for your processes. You can also use change and release management tools and platforms to automate, orchestrate, and track activities. Additionally, change and release management reviews and audits can help evaluate and verify the effectiveness of your processes. Lastly, change and release management training and communication can educate stakeholders about your processes and outcomes. Ultimately, by implementing feedback for improvement, you can increase your change and release management capabilities and maturity.

5 Monitor feedback for continuous improvement

To ensure that your change and release management processes and outcomes are always aligned with your feedback goals and expectations, you need to monitor feedback for continuous improvement. This can be done through various methods and tools, such as feedback loops and cycles to collect, analyze, implement, and monitor feedback on a regular basis. Additionally, feedback metrics and KPIs can help measure and track progress, while feedback dashboards and reports can communicate performance and impact with stakeholders, customers, and users. Finally, fostering a positive attitude towards feedback among your team and organization is key to creating a feedback culture.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?