A release (management) playbook contains all details of release management processes, responsibilities and reporting. This playbook also serves as the SLA (Service Level Agreement) of our managed service: Release Management as-a-service.
We usually work with the following 7 chapters to cover every aspects of release management:
release strategy
release stages
release gates
release meetings/calls/chat-channels
release stakeholders
release roles
release work products
Your Release Playbook is customised (or created from scratch) via several workshops and its 1.0 version is approved by the assigned representatives of your IT organisation. A Release Playbook is a living document (online document, Confluence pages, Google Sites, etc.) that must be reviewed and updated on a regular basis. We usually recommend to start with quarterly reviews and after few reviews updates can be done yearly.