ITIL Release Management and Testing in Shared Environments

[PFCITIL]

I work for a North American insurance company with an in-house development shop, revenues ~600M per annum. We're just putting the finishing touches on a new set of shared testing environments for distributed apps in development. At the same time, we’re on the cusp of a large proliferation of parallel development streams, using IBM Rational ClearCase (but not ClearQuest).
Everything IT at this company is either being updated, or needs to be (ClearCase was a big change last year, and now the new non-production environments). Updating processes across the board is also underway, with implementation proceeding piecemeal through portfolio projects (our PMO got its upgrade two years back). Our CIO has chosen to adopt ITIL to assist in all this process modernization.

Testing is always a difficult area to introduce systematic changes; it’s its own community of practice and so many lines of business are involved. So as a beginning, we’re trying to update the processes around testing to achieve some minimum improvements before we tackle testing head-on – Release Management in particular. We figure a strong Release Management regimen – for example, with solid entry & exit criteria for promotion through our non-production environments – will at the very least bring added discipline and associated benefits to testing.

That’s what we figure, but now it’s time to convince the portfolio manager and the non-IT executive. Has anyone seen anything like this before? Could you share a little of what changes in testing can realistically be expected, with something like Release Management delivered for the practice?
If you know of any case studies out there in the ether, white papers or articles or something, that’d also be great. If we could face our executive and tell them, ‘these other companies had release schedule delays due to testing cut by x% because of Release Management’, that’d be ideal.

PFCITIL