Improving Software Release Management

I just found this in my inbox, 7 Ways to Improve Your Software Release Management. It's an excellent overview of 'doing things differently'. Pretty similar to the change that I experienced at the last job... and something that Mike Dierken at the current job just seems to know instinctively.

I need to find some stuff on the best ways to do personal lightweight processes. I'd like to be more efficient in producing software... especially software that is based upon speculative ideas. So much of the time data mining and machine learning coding is subject to the vagaries of the data set you are working against and it's difficult to know ahead of time if a given algorithm will work well.. how much data cleaning needs to be done... etc.

How can you adapt lightweight processes and the things mentioned above for producing software that is not so cut and dried in what needs to be done? In those situations I tend to ping-pong between little process (seat of the pants coding) and too much (excessive research and design before coding start).

Post script: Had to add this:

Five Things Linus Torvalds Has Learned About Managing Software Projects