Have you ever been kept waiting for an approval of a software release? Chasing senior management? Explaining to people who have no clue how your software works why this change is necessary?
Whether you’re working in a controlled environment like a bank, or you’re working on a customer-facing website for a retailer, or you’re delivering a new feature for a SaaS, in all of these circumstances some sort of approval will be required.
How you get the approvals and when you get the approvals aren’t usually that important. Just follow the rules. Simply state when you want to make your change and what the content of that change will be. You might also need to provide some form of contingency planning.
If you can show this to the boss, the compliance officer, the change approval board – whoever is in charge of releasing – then you stand a better chance of getting your change approved. You can even do this before you’ve started working on the change.
The most important thing is to get them and make sure that you are ready to go.
Then, whenever you want to release some new software, you can.