Change Management Best Practices

Follow these best practices when making changes in projects across environments.

Effective change management is critical to ensuring seamless updates across environments, from testing to production. Whether you're a partner administrator, analyst, or responsible for managing changes across multiple environments, it's crucial to validate changes, safeguard backups, and align the change lists in the production versions of your Visier environments to ensure your modifications are accurate and maintain system stability.

Start making changes in the production environment

We recommend making changes directly in the production environment while adhering to the established project lifecycle process. Ensure you thoroughly validate and preview all changes before finalizing and publishing them. If you have more advanced requirements, Visier offers more sophisticated Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) options that allow seamless integration with your own continuous integration or continuous delivery process.

Validate your changes

Once you've made your changes, validate by:

• Previewing in the administrating tenant.
• Previewing in the analytic tenants. Select some analytic tenants to review the changes with data from analytic tenants. Any changes related to data configurations such as mappings and business rules will require you to run a job before you are able to preview in the analytic tenants.
• Conducting peer reviews. Have a team member review the project for completeness and accuracy before releasing to production.
• Transferring the changes from the production environment to other environments in Visier.

Back up your projects

Export a copy of your projects to create a backup.

Create a pre-publication export when testing a project in the integration environment that will later be transferred to another environment such as production. Always export the project before publishing in any environment. Exporting your project saves time and reduces errors by eliminating the need to manually recreate it in the new environment.

Production versions can be exported via API after the project is published, but UI-based exports will no longer be available.

Sync changes with other environments

Depending on your organization’s needs and technical resources, choose the appropriate method for syncing changes: Software Development Lifecycle APIs or user interface (UI).

The Software Development Lifecycle APIs (Production Versions API and Sources API) are ideal for projects with multiple, complex environments and those comfortable using APIs for change management. They allow programmatic management of changes to ensure consistency and accuracy. However, you must manually track unversioned changes such as changes to sources and profiles.

The UI-based approach is best if you have less than three environments and your team has limited technical resources. Manually importing and exporting projects using the UI can be cumbersome.