Welcome to my blog. I'm Jim Scardelis, and I've been a Release Manager for one or another of the core development groups that design, develop and deploy into Operations the various software systems that the Microsoft.com Web sites since the turn of the century.

Currently, (and for about the last four years) I work in a group called MPT -- the Microsoft.com Platform Team -- which is one of a family of groups within Microsoft that do the bulk of the development work for sites, such as www.microsoft.com, msdn.microsoft.com, profile.microsoft.com, technet.microsoft.com, and members.microsoft.com, which are housed within the MSCOM Operational environment. If you've visited www.microsoft.com, or registered a product, or bought a product from Microsoft's Web site directly, looked up information on a Microsoft Official Curriculum training course, or even used the link in the Windows Event Viewer that lets you get more details online -- you've used something that I, or someone on my team, has worked on. Although we're in the MPT group, our team is responsible for Release Management across several other groups as well.

Which brings us to exactly what Release Managers do. Well, there's a few things, some of which are described pretty well in the description of Release Managers in the Microsoft Solution Framework. Also, we are responsible for maintainig the policies and process that we use to develop software -- also known as the SDLC, or Software Development Life Cycle. We work within the development teams, and are responsible for holding the teams accountable for fulfilling their responsibilities in the process. We sometimes act as as an interface between Operations and the development teams, and are often counted on to provide a strategic viewpoint and identify and manage cross-team dependencies, since we're placed in such a way as to have a multi-project, multi-team view.

We're also responsible for the main deliverables in the Deployment phase of the SDLC -- we create the Release Plan and oversee the deployment into the Operational environment, working closely with the MSCOM Operations team.

Through this blog, I plan on giving an insight into the other side of Microsoft.com -- the behind the scenes work, involving literally hundreds of people on several different teams,  that goes on long before the bits get anywhere near the production servers. I'd love to hear your questions -- especially any policy / process type questions that you might have.