Riley Woods

Release Manager with over eight years delivering IT change across government, enterprise health, and managed services, currently owning release governance for compliance-heavy national health programs at Telstra Health. ITIL V4 certified, with a proven record of building repeatable, cross-functional release processes that keep product, engineering, and delivery teams shipping in sync. Skilled at leading through influence and bringing structure to fast-moving, regulated environments, with working familiarity across CI/CD and release-automation tooling

Release Manager at Telstra Health (2025-07 – Present)

• Governed the end-to-end release lifecycle for two concurrent enterprise products with distinct delivery tempos, balancing the stability requirements of a mature critical service against the velocity demands of a newly launched, rapid-growth product.
• Drove quality uplift of the MSP's delivery pipeline within Azure and Salesforce CI/CD workflows, improving code management practices, enforcing pre-release testing gates, and reducing defect rates reaching production by more than 50%.
• Chaired Go/No Go sessions and CAB endorsements, holding authority to block Go-Live where technical or operational readiness criteria are not met.
• Coordinated release windows and milestone planning across product owners, delivery managers, and a primary managed service provider on a 2-week Agile sprint cadence, tracking both functional and non-functional changes with their differing business drivers through to production in Jira.
• Managed deployment of Salesforce packages, metadata, and manual configuration changes through CI/CD pipelines in a clinically important and compliance-heavy environment, ensuring adherence to federal government standards and contractual agreements.
• Partnered with product and marketing teams to deliver external-facing release communications, collaboratively building client-ready release notes so that product, engineering, and commercial teams shipped in sync.
• Prioritised safe and reliable delivery of clinically sensitive product updates, maintaining service continuity for users in vulnerable situations.

Release Manager at Telstra Health (2025-07 – Present)

Achievements

• Stabilised a post-launch product from a volatile, high-defect state into a structured release cadence, cutting production defect leakage by more than 50% through improved regression and testing oversight.
• Delivered zero-downtime deployment of a new web chat platform and associated security uplifts for a federal government client, a high-risk release with direct impact on victim support service availability.
• Aligned both products to Telstra Health's newly introduced enterprise Release Management framework within tenure, establishing consistent cross-product governance, security controls, and release standards.

Release and Environment Coordinator at SA Police (SAPOL) (2022-06 – 2025-07)

• Established SAPOL's release and environment management processes from the ground up, defining consistent procedures, governance standards, and tooling (Jenkins, Subversion, Jira) across the wider IT department in a complex multi-vendor environment.
• Served as stand-in IT Change Enablement Lead, facilitating Change Advisory Boards, owning governance of the change lifecycle, and coaching stakeholders through process adoption and behavioural change.
• Planned and managed the full release calendar across BAU and project workstreams, coordinating all key stakeholders from scheduling through to post-implementation review.
• Managed environment schedules across production and non-production tiers, including coordination of data refreshes and overnight outage-associated deployments for core policing applications.
• Collaborated with police officers, project officers, developers, and testers to maintain alignment with project objectives, proactively resolving risks and blockers ahead of deployment windows.
• Partnered with senior police leadership, including Superintendents, to shape all-staff release communications for critical policing systems, translating complex technical change into clear, operationally appropriate language for frontline personnel.
• Established KPI frameworks and senior leadership reporting for the release management capability, enabling data-driven visibility into release health and performance trends.

Release and Environment Coordinator at SA Police (SAPOL) (2022-06 – 2025-07)

Achievements

• Led the redesign of the Change Enablement function, delivering a 30% reduction in CAB entries and measurably lowering delivery risk by shifting teams toward smaller, iterative deployments, a direct cultural shift toward continuous delivery practices.
• Automated recurring annual maintenance tasks using CI/CD methodologies, eliminating manual FTE overhead across the Christmas break period.
• Sole end-to-end release and deployment manager for a full SAPOL network outage, owning planning, coordination, execution, and post-implementation review independently.
• Received commendations from senior executives for performance under high-pressure, time-critical deployment scenarios.

Release Coordinator at Data Action (2021-09 – 2022-05)

• Managed end-to-end release scheduling across multiple concurrent client environments, coordinating pre-production and production deployments through Octopus Deploy with internal teams and external stakeholders.
• Served as primary release communication lead for clients, authoring and distributing release artefacts, managing approval workflows, and ensuring all parties had clear visibility of change contents and deployment timelines.
• Managed feature flag enablement for client-specific product functionality, confirming commercial entitlements, coordinating internal approvals, and governing controlled feature releases across a multi-client environment.
• Developed deep working knowledge of each client's environment and application suite, enabling tailored release planning across a diverse client portfolio, with workflow tracking in Jira.
• Collaborated with project managers to align release schedules with project workloads and deadlines, participating in and hosting stakeholder meetings up to senior leadership level.

Release Coordinator at Data Action (2021-09 – 2022-05)

Achievements

• Automated a suite of digital release forms covering creation, population, distribution, and archiving, reducing team administrative overhead by 3 hours per week.
• Coordinated complex multi-client data refreshes with minimal disruption to live operations.
• Recognised by account management and senior leadership for rapid onboarding and early contribution to release delivery.

Release Manager at DXC Technology (2018-08 – 2021-09)

• Managed a high volume of concurrent application and infrastructure releases for a major government client, owning each change end-to-end, including planning and stakeholder coordination through to deployment, incident handover, and post-implementation review.
• Created detailed release plans incorporating feedback from stakeholders across a complex multi-vendor environment, maintaining deep environment knowledge across application and infrastructure layers to support in-flight troubleshooting during deployments.
• Coordinated releases across daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly cadences including BAU, weekend, and overnight windows, adapting governance and scheduling rigour to each release type and risk profile.
• Coordinated multiple technical resources simultaneously during complex deployments, providing real-time direction and facilitating structured incident handovers to ensure continuity of troubleshooting where required.
• Delivered clear, concise technical release updates to senior government client executives, translating deployment complexity into accessible reporting for non-technical leadership audiences.
• Ensured adherence to strict governance, compliance, and reporting procedures throughout the release lifecycle, maintaining detailed release schedules, PIR documentation, and change records.

Release Manager at DXC Technology (2018-08 – 2021-09)

Achievements

• Led critical deployments during the COVID-19 pandemic that delivered direct, time-sensitive benefit to the Australian public, executing under elevated pressure to deliver with no margin for error or delay.
• Delivered a broad portfolio of high-complexity infrastructure releases including mainframe maintenance, Wintel and Linux server patching, mainframe-to-centralised-system data migration, disaster recovery testing, on-premises to cloud migrations, and large quarterly release events.
• Voluntarily developed an internal automation program that reduced file search overhead by 5 - 20 hours per month across the team. This was identified, scoped, and delivered independently outside of core responsibilities.
• Received multiple recognition awards from senior government client executives for sustained delivery quality and successful achievement of release milestones.

IT Service Desk Team Member at The Westpac Group (2017-04 – 2018-08)

• Provided first-contact IT support across Westpac's multi-brand banking environment, maintaining high-quality incident records and escalating major outages promptly to minimise business impact.
• Consistently exceeded productivity benchmarks and received peer-nominated recognition for service quality.

Bachelor of Information Technology in Enterprise Business Solutions – University of South Australia (2016 – 2022)