If you've been reading the research I've been writing over the past year, you know that I'm a fan of implementing an application life-cycle management strategy that focuses on increasing development flow and supports high-performance teams. You don't need to religiously implement all 22 CMMI processes or deliver dozens of intermediate development artifacts like some leading processes advocate. Rather, there are certain important processes that you should spend your time on. We wrote about change-aware continuous integration and just-in-time demand management in last year's Agile Development Management Tools Forrester Wave™. They are two of my favorite areas of focus, and they are great areas to invest in, but once you have them working well, there are other areas that will require your focus. In my opinion, the next process where you should focus on flow is everything that happens post build and preproduction. Most folks think about this process as release management or configuration management, but I think there's a better term that focuses on how quickly software changes move through both processes. It's called continuous delivery. When you focus on establishing a process of continuous delivery, you'll find that your capacity to release changes will increase, your null release cycle will shrink, and a larger proportion of the productivity gains you've seen from your Agile development efforts will flow through into production.