Ramblings of a Microsoft.com PM : General

Making Microsoft.com a better place for mobile browsers

Jim Scardelis — Wed, 21 May 2008 03:14:51 GMT

Once in awhile, I get to work on something really cool that makes a difference for a bunch of folks. Most of the time, though, the effect is only really seen inside the company by the people that use our tools or processes. Today is one of those days...(read more)

Cool software

Jim Scardelis — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 02:00:37 GMT

Like many folks these days, my wife & I have a computer in the kitchen. Occasionally, there are files, like lists of stuff we have, that we need to access from various computers, whether from work, or just from our primary computers in our studies....(read more)

What I’ve been up to…

Jim Scardelis — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 01:37:02 GMT

It’s been a long time since I last blogged, mostly because late last Spring, I transitioned out of the Release Management role in Microsoft.com (now part of the Microsoft.com Operations Team) into a Program Management role in one of the software development...(read more)

Documentation in an agile world ... how much is enough, and how do you decide?

Jim Scardelis — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 02:15:00 GMT

This morning, I was looking through one of the stack of trade magazines that seems to find its way to my mailbox and read a very interesting article on software documentation that I wanted to share with you. In the article, (“ Documentation Strategies...(read more)

Changes... (been busy)

Jim Scardelis — Tue, 30 May 2006 08:34:00 GMT

I've been kind of slow posting since a number of things have been in flux back at the office. Over the last few weeks: We had a re-org in the Microsoft.com space. Some of the chips haven't finished falling yet, I think, but essentially my team moved out...(read more)

MSCOM Release Checklists..

Jim Scardelis — Tue, 04 Apr 2006 20:27:00 GMT

The MSCOM Ops team just put a good description of Operations interacts with our software development life cycle (SDLC) process up on their blog . It's a good read. Included therein are a couple of versions of the documents that my team uses to track the...(read more)

So... what's a Release Manager anyway?

Jim Scardelis — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 00:52:00 GMT

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.