Delivered capability · Tier 1 data scope
Environments drift. Work is built and tested in user-acceptance-testing (UAT) and never promoted; test artefacts leak into production; the same item is changed differently in two places and nobody can say which version is right. By the time a platform upgrade arrives, the release is a leap of faith. This capability compares environments two ways (production versus UAT) or three ways (adding the next platform version), classifies every item, and ends in a runbook rather than a spreadsheet.
Work types, forms, option sets, workflows, and document templates compared item by item across production, user-acceptance-testing, and, ahead of an upgrade, the next platform version.
Each compared item lands in exactly one class: aligned; promotion gap (built and tested but never released); pollution (test artefacts sitting in production); drift (the same item quietly diverged); or conflict (both sides changed, so a human must choose).
Every non-aligned item receives a recorded decision (promote, retire, or hold) with a named owner, so the comparison produces commitments, not a list someone files.
The agreed decisions sequenced into an ordered, dependency-aware runbook your team executes, instead of promoting items in whatever order they were found.
Divergent items attributed through the change audit: who changed what, when, and in which environment, so the review starts from evidence rather than recollection.
Configuration is exported read-only from each environment and compared structurally; no matter content is touched, so this sits at Tier 1 data sensitivity. The capability has been delivered end to end on a live engagement (roughly 3,200 items compared across three environments). It runs today as an engagement-scoped service alongside the audit rather than inside the productised audit lens pipeline, which is why the items above carry roadmap chips.
On one live engagement, roughly 3,200 configuration items were compared across production, user-acceptance-testing, and the next platform version. Of the 1,026 document-template items, 647 were aligned, 213 needed review, 108 were promotion gaps (built and tested but never released), 28 were conflicts, 15 were pollution, and 15 remained to classify at the point the register was handed over.
Releases stop being a leap of faith. You know exactly what will change before it changes, every divergence carries a decision and an owner in the register, and the promotion runbook turns an upgrade weekend into an ordered checklist your own team can execute and re-run.
