Inspired by the " Why are you still deploying overnight?" post that got a lot of traction, especially in the DevOps fold, John E. Vincent decided to write a pair of blog posts on his own view of the major myths and facts surronding Operations.  His first post is more on the theoretical side and here were his takeaways:

• The risk associated with deploying new code is not in the deploy itself but everything you did up to that point.
• The way to make deploying new code less risky is to do it more often, not less.
• Create a culture and environment that enables and encourages small, frequent releases.
• Everything fails. Embrace failure.
• Make deploys trivial, automated and tolerant of failure.

-- John E. Vincent

His second post, "Deploy ALL the Things" provides more concrete information about understanding Operations and the techniques required to manage risk and deploy strategically.  A lot of the patterns are also found in our Continuous Delivery Refcard.

I encourage you to check out both of the posts linked below.

Sources: http://blog.lusis.org/blog/2011/10/18/rollbacks-and-other-deployment-myths/    http://blog.lusis.org/blog/2011/10/18/deploy-all-the-things/