Reconciling change management and continuous delivery.

Change management has its place. But when misapplied and overprescribed, it hinders innovation. Research from Gartner, Forrester, DORA, and other firms suggests that, in the context of shipping software, heavy change management undermines business performance.

Nevertheless, organizations will cling to change management and put off continuous delivery until their concerns around operational health, security, and compliance are addressed. Feature management offers the safeguards needed to accelerate software delivery in a low-risk, compliant fashion.

With LaunchDarkly feature flags, you can confidently decentralize software change approvals. You can enable change managers and IT operators to devote more energy to strategic projects. You can pursue continuous delivery without fearing the risks and regulatory implications as much. You can automate change controls within deployment and release workflows. And finally, you can advance platform standardization with feature management as a bedrock capability.

Feature flags aren’t a panacea. But for many, their impact on software delivery is nothing short of profound.