Description
As your business and Salesforce instance grows, it becomes harder to reap the benefits that Salesforce affords. Join Kevin Boyle and Ian Gotts to explore how Salesforce DevOps can help your team deliver more business value, faster, and in turn maximize Salesforce ROI.
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Transcript
So welcome everyone to the Gearset DevOps Summit, scale your Salesforce DevOps to maximize ROI. If you attended the last summit a few months ago, then welcome back. If it's your first time coming to a Gearset Summit, you've got a fantastic few hours ahead of you. A lot of great speakers today, that you can take away your learnings and apply it to your own business.
So my name is Ben McCarthy. I'm founder of Salesforce Ben dot com, and I'm very happy to be hosting this great event alongside some amazing speakers. So you might have noticed that DevOps or Salesforce DevOps is one of the most trending topics in the industry today, and that's because customers and users are demanding more from their systems than ever before. However, as Salesforce becomes more strategic and more complex, it's getting harder to reap the rewards.
And this is why Salesforce DevOps is increasingly important. It helps you manage complexity as you scale, in turn, unlocking greater ROI. And that's what we're gonna speak about today. So I'm very happy to introduce Kevin, who is CEO of Gearset and Ian Gotts, CEO of elements dot cloud to get things kicked off with our keynote.
Welcome, guys. Great to see you here. I would like to take it away.
Thanks very much, Ben, and and good morning, everyone. It's my pleasure to welcome you all to the Gearset DevOps Summit. As Ben said, our theme today is getting increased ROI from Salesforce.
Now we know that companies invest a lot in Salesforce, both, financially and also through, through their people. And we wanted to talk this morning about how an effective DevOps strategy can be an important lever in in seeing a return on that investment.
So I'm Kevin, the CEO here at GearSat. I'm a software engineer by background and started GearSat alongside my cofounder, Matt Dickens, to help Salesforce professionals collaborate and build great solutions atop the platform.
We've grown GearSat to over a hundred people in just four admittedly very hectic years. I have offices in Chicago, Cambridge, and London.
I spend my time at Gearset working with our users during their trial, proof of concept, or onboarding, and love learning as much as I can about what's the next thing that we can do to make life better for Salesforce teams.
And it's my pleasure to be doing this keynote today with Ian Gotz, the CEO with Elements Cloud, an amazing ISB in the ecosystem.
So thank you, Kev. I've been a customer and a partner for over twenty years of Salesforce. So I'm passionate about helping customers both directly and also through the systems integration and ISB partners get a better return on investment from Salesforce. So that's about writing books, presenting at events like this, and, of course, our elements platform and the integrations to the ISV partners.
So as we said, the challenge is how do you grow the Salesforce ROI as you continue to scale.
So having been around Salesforce for twenty plus years, I've seen a huge growth in the usage by customers, but I I see them struggling to drive up that return on investment.
So today is all about the approaches that you can apply to your business to increase the value you get from that the money you're spending on Salesforce.
So Salesforce has come a long way from when it was a a cloud Salesforce automation app, which was sold to me by two guys in a Regis office in Bracknell. It's a very different and a hugely capable platform now.
So Salesforce has invested very heavily to innovate and expand the platform capabilities, both through their own development, but also through mergers and acquisitions, and also the integrations. So it's now the strategic platform for teams of all sizes, whether you're a small business or the largest enterprise.
And the other thing that's happening now is that platform can support every business area, and it's integrated into the other enterprise applications in your tech stack.
So naturally, the power and scale scalability and the potential of Salesforce has ramped up over the years, but also the complexity of those orgs has also increased.
So Forrester, who are the industry analysts, coined the phrase the Salesforce at scale dilemma, and that was back in two thousand seventeen.
And the way they phrased it in their report was in the initial success with your implementation in one area, suddenly, other people see that and there's demands for more. Other departments want to start using it. Other the business leaders see the benefits and want to make sure that it expands into their area, like mark marketing automation or analytics.
All of a sudden, new custom applications and customizations explode.
And that means your team's ability to be agile and deliver value starts to suffer. And I think the phrase they used in the in that report was the complexity of scale crushes Salesforce's value.
All the apps and the customizations and the integrations take longer to manage, longer to update, longer to release and monitor. So it becomes expensive to to get new changes out, and it takes a long time to respond to business demands. And now the ROI and the agility that you bought Salesforce for disappears.
But as the report says, it doesn't have to be this way. If you invest in the tools and the processes and the people, the business can stay agile and at the same time provide the governance that you must put in place if you're gonna manage Salesforce as a strategic application.
So as Ben said at the beginning, DevOps is is an increasing trend, but we see two other trends that are that are increasing in Salesforce alongside that. One is business analysis and the other is center of excellence. And the point is that they are complementary. They all work together, and they're the building blocks for a strong return on investment.
So let's start with at the heart there. The center of excellence is the heart of every good implementation.
Now we haven't got time to go into it, but there are thirteen pillars that define the different aspects of a center of excellence, excellence such as governance, architecture, standards, and tooling.
And ten k advisers, did a survey, and they discovered that ninety one percent of organizations who had the highest ROI had a center of excellence. So clearly, that's important.
If we look at the top of that diagram, business analysis.
Too often people rush into build without really understanding the true business needs and also the implications of making those changes. And those changes can be both technical and organizational.
So business analysis covers feedback, requirements capture, business process mapping, org impact analysis, and user stories. So time spent here will save rework and headaches downstream. It's far better and cheaper to find out the bad news early and respond to it than discover it in production, which feeds then into DevOps, which is all about building the right thing the building the thing right. Business analysis was about building the right thing. DevOps is about building the thing right.
And it's all about streamlining the process for taking those user stories and deliver delivering them into production.
And then apply automation wherever possible to accelerate it and improve quality and also compliance.
So the end result should be repeatable and measurable.
So today is really focused on that bottom area, which is the return on investment for DevOps.
Thanks, Ian. Those are three trends that we're seeing across our users too as folks try to avoid losing that ROI that Salesforce has given them as they scale.
What we have seen is the single best way to keep your velocity and and not only maintain, but indeed grow your Salesforce ROI as you scale is to have an effective DevOps strategy.
A measurable DevOps strategy and process should have demonstrable real world impact. And the better the process you invest in, the greater ROI you'll see.
And teams who haven't made the switch to DevOps yet are at a real risk of losing out on the clear financial benefits and increased business agility, achieved by establishing a high performing DevOps process.
DevOps is gonna help your team avoid the Salesforce skill dilemma and instead accelerate delivery and become more responsive to business needs.
You also get to have that increased responsiveness within a robust framework that maintains your security, compliance, and stability.
Our state of Salesforce DevOps survey confirms that eighty four percent of Salesforce professionals were able to reduce complexity by adopting a source driven workflow and implementing a Salesforce specific DevOps solution with CI and CD.
DevOps is great protectings and makes for happier collaboration, but it also has a very tangible impact on your end users and the work they're trying to get done and ultimately then the business outcomes.
The evidence is consistently strong.
Salesforce users that implement DevOps and everything that goes along with it report much higher levels of ROI from Salesforce.
And this isn't just through more releases, though that plays a big part. It's also about having a culture of measurement to track and benchmark progress, investing in the right talent, and implementing the right tools to build out and streamline your process.
Over the next few slides, we're gonna be looking at some of the real world impacts that a DevOps strategy can bring to your business backed by the findings from our twenty twenty one state of Salesforce DevOps report.
We're gonna kick off with something simple.
DevOps equals faster release cycles, which equals more agility.
But why? Well, with a well understood and defined DevOps process, your release pipeline can can contain multiple work streams and support parallel projects at different stages.
New features are continuously tested and released with less risk and ceremony than with traditional release windows.
In other words, your team can switch between projects and incorporate stakeholder feedback, you know, much more readily. In essence, you're removing conflicts, bottlenecks, and blockages, and allowing business users more opportunity to provide feedback, all of which is is what agile is all about.
DevOps makes teams faster and better able to respond to business challenges as they arise and ultimately results in far greater ROI.
And the great news is this is a big area of focus for our DevOps teams in twenty twenty one. We're seeing release cadences increasing as teams strive towards continuously delivering value.
In our state of Salesforce DevOps report, we find that nearly half of respondents fell into the top two categories that release at least once a week, if not multiple times each day.
This is a fantastic positive sign, and we expect these numbers to keep on increasing.
I'd love to hear in the chat how often you deploy to production and how many of you have achieved that continuous delivery holy grail of of multiple releases per day.
Related fast deployment slash turnaround times.
The deployments along a Salesforce pipeline have traditionally been error prone and time consuming because you had to use suboptimal manual tools like change sets or unsuitable automation tools that weren't really designed for Salesforce.
That meant that getting changes from development through to testing and finally on to production was painful.
DevOps can boost your deployment success rates dramatically, and GearSoft's powerful deployment engine in particular can make a huge difference by flagging up and resolving common deployments issues.
Elements cloud can have a big impact here too. You know, as as Ian said, you know, you want good user stories that have the right requirements and all that upfront upfront impact analysis of the metadata changes. It'll make your pipeline much smoother and faster.
And shorter turnaround times means your business saves money, and you can free up folks to work on other more important, more fun projects instead of babysitting brittle automation.
Speaking of automation, when it's done correctly, it's one of those things that gets better and better over time.
Failing CI jobs on a Jenkins server somewhere that nobody looks at obviously won't gain you anything, but robust CI designed for Salesforce will.
If you can get even a ten percent efficiency gain across each release, then that compounds and results in huge time savings for your team on every deployment.
DevOps tools also automate testing, saving you from doing a lot of those tasks manually.
And as I've already touched on, high quality code that's validated and tested in advance of each release results in less time spent on resolving critical errors and bugs later.
So all in all, with automation, you'll free up masses of time to be spent delivering value elsewhere rather than fixing bugs and performing time consuming manual tasks and hot fixes in production. It's a win win.
Monitoring is also an overlooked but vital part of Salesforce DevOps.
This is what keeps your teams informed of unauthorized and unexpected changes to your orgs.
With gearset change monitoring, you can get automated alerts that give you early warning of potential issues.
Team leads can then decide on the right course of action, be it to move that change downstream back into sandboxes or roll it back and ask the team member to follow the proper process.
For those more serious incidents where something, you know, has gone really wrong, Salesforce orgs also need backups of both data and metadata.
Data loss can occur for many reasons. It could be developer or admin error, Salesforce outages, or integrations run amok to name just a few.
So you need a tool like Gearset that has backup and robust restore capabilities safeguarding your orgs and, you know, thus your your business continuity.
As you see predictable ROI from Salesforce, the business will inevitably invest, and your team will grow.
What's great is that DevOps has scalability baked in.
Workflows based on branching strategies and version control make it possible for your team to add any number of new development environments.
That means your process can grow in line with increased business demand and team expansions.
That's because an efficient DevOps setup can accommodate any number of new work streams with the same testing, review, and quality assurance procedures baked into the same release process.
So thank you, Kev. So let let me just take this home with it with the last, few slides of that set. So number six. So if you've got a well understood and streamlined DevOps process with version control as the single source of truth, you can bake in quality assurance and release governance at every stage.
That also means you can allocate the resources correctly based on the level of the risk of a release, which means you can fast track low release release releases getting them out faster. So daily or hourly. So it used to be a choice. Run fast and break stuff or walk slowly slowly and stay safe. So but the combination of strong business analysis and great DevOps processes means that you can run fast and stay safe. So that means faster releases and improved quality.
So if you're delivering releases more quickly, then your businesses users will see that Salesforce is keeping pace with the business transformation that they require. That gives them confidence that the suggested changes that they're making will be implemented. They get more engaged, and they provide better requirements.
They get changes they need to operate better, more quickly, and that's a virtuous circle. And it makes user driven development a reality.
But that requires the entire development environment cycle to be optimized. The aim is to provide clear, well written user stories with supporting documentation and metadata risk assessment. So So if that poorly defined user stories are passed to DevOps, the result's gonna be rework and ultimately poor user adoption.
Accelerating development doesn't help. The faster you go, the further you go in the wrong direction.
So a well implemented DevOps strategy will increase time to value.
But there's an added benefit. There's nothing more soul destroying than building an app that never gets used or grinding through change sets.
A well honed process with tools that take out the repetitive manual busy work and seeing end users getting the most out of Salesforce is really empowering to the teams. So there's a and there's also a multiplying effect here that you need to consider. The development team can impact hundreds of end users who will in turn will impact thousands of customers.
And actually, seeing the direct impact of their work lifts development team morale.
So at the beginning, I talked about the Salesforce at scale dilemma.
Avoiding this means that that vital agility that Salesforce was bought for continues.
So if you think about the last two years, digital transformation is driving huge changes across organizational processes.
Those need to be supported by Salesforce.
And organizations who are able to respond more quickly will be the winners.
Effective DevOps is really gonna be the competitive advantage here. So faster releases with high quality features and tight feedback loops, they're the key to unlocking the future success and maximizing your Salesforce return on investment.
So as you see can see, DevOps can increase your Salesforce return on investment. And as I'll show you later on, DevOps will help you get more value out of Salesforce. But it also reduces costs, especially in terms of the hours your team spends on deployments and fixing releases. So it's automation that supercharges your return on investment. And as you can see here from the chart, the recent ten k adviser survey identified that seventy three percent of organizations with the highest ROI released at least daily. And I can see in the chat lots of you are doing that, and that's fantastic.
As Ian said, the highest ROI is achieved when you have a DevOps strategy that allows you to release daily. But for those of us that aren't there yet, how do we get there? In this final section, we're going to be looking at understanding where you are in your DevOps journey and how you can start to think about where you want your process to go next. What are your team's goals, your business's goals, and how are you gonna get there?
Your Salesforce ROI really should be increasing alongside your DevOps maturity.
If you find yourself running into issues as your team grows in scale and complexity, it's a sign that your process also needs to grow and reach that next level of maturity.
However, as Ian covered before, we wanna make sure we're going in the right direction. The faster you go, the further you go in the wrong direction is a phrase that I really liked.
It's important to understand our business needs, the tools and processes we're implementing, and making sure that the whole team is on board.
This is something we talk about a lot at Gearset. It's our DevOps maturity model.
As your process begins to improve and mature, you'll start to reap more benefits, deploy faster, deliver more value, and ultimately maximize ROI.
The first significant change as your team's process scales is moving away from change sets.
This will have a significant impact on ROI.
Moving towards a solution like Gearset speeds up deployments on a scale of, like, around ten x faster as well as increasing the deployment success rate with customers using Gearset having an average of ninety three percent of their deployments work first time. Then as you start to move towards the practitioner level, bringing in source control, you get to that next big ROI lever.
The big difference here is moving from org as source of truth to version control as source of truth.
The ROI you get comes from better collaboration, visibility, resilience, but some of those gains can be offset by needing to keep a source control system in sync and the investment that you might need to make in training. So So it's it's a hugely valuable step in its own right, but it actually just lays the foundations for true DevOps maturity.
It's on our expert level of maturity where we bring in automation.
Implementing end to end CICD brings about huge time savings and increases agility for your team.
You'll also have automated testing and monitoring alerts, so you're able to maintain that process and ensure the quality of releases is still high.
By having these better quality releases, you'll be delivering better features, spending less time fixing bugs, speeding up the turnaround time, and ultimately getting more from Salesforce.
And finally, making sure your business, has, you know, a nice resilient process is the final piece of the puzzle.
Having robust backup and restore tools, processes, and strategies ensures business continuity in the case of a disaster.
It also gives teams the confidence to release innovative solutions and pursue market opportunities because they trust their release process and its recoverability.
It can be pretty daunting to figure out where to start and how to actually begin improving your DevOps process, but there are some things that will put you in a great position to start.
The first step sorta analyze and understand what your business needs. What is your company looking to get out of their Salesforce investment? What are the goals, and what value do they wanna see coming from it? Once it's understood how you wanna reap the benefits from Salesforce, you can start to build your roadmap to success. What your DevOps process and team will need in order to be able to deliver on those company goals.
Building your success roadmap will involve, you know, your entire Salesforce team. Start to think about where you wanna end up by the end of the year or two years, and then work back to split the work up into chunks.
Make sure the whole team is aligned on what you wanna achieve.
Splitting up the work ensures you don't try to rush ahead and layer on DevOps complexity too quickly. Remember it's a it's a stepping stone approach to success.
While you're planning out this road map, you'll need to evaluate what DevOps tooling you'll need, whether it's first party tooling or a complete DevOps solution like Gearset. You'll want to plan time for evaluation and training to make sure the entire team knows the process and steps involved.
Figure out what your process wants to look like and then find tools which will make that possible without months and months of implementation and ramp up time.
Measuring DevOps performance as you scale your process is really important too. Tools like Elements Cloud can offer something really comprehensive here. But even identifying the metrics that matter to you and tracking them, you know, that can be a a fine starting point too.
It's an important step to include in this journey as it'll help you understand the performance data and what impact DevOps is having.
That will enable you to make gradual improvements and keep tweaking your process to align with your business goals, And that will ultimately, you know, yield a higher ROI.
Finally, implementing a center of excellence can work really well for some organizations.
So a COE could look after all the things that Ian discussed before, things like onboarding, process documentation, gradual process improvements in line with, you know, your overall DevOps journey, and be champions of DevOps and champions of Salesforce communicating the benefits of both to all stakeholders across the business.
This can work really well for keeping your DevOps process on track and aligned with the rest of the business. However, you may find that your team is already doing that or COE isn't right for where you're currently at, and that that's fine too. It's about figuring out what the best plan of action is for your team and your business. And luckily, there are so many great resources out there to help you with this from Trailhead, DevOps Launchpad, Salesforce Ben, and all the other fantastic publications.
So whether you're a customer or not, we're passionate about educating the ecosystem on the power of DevOps. We both Kevin and I both speak to thousands of customers, so we're always here to give advice on what the DevOps process and how that could work for your team. And, our emails are on the next slide. And I know that Carevan and the Gearset team are always available to chat about your release process, the challenges, and the goals.
We talked about that state of Salesforce DevOps research, which is, again, really comprehensive research of DevOps in the marketplace. There's a QR code there. If you click on that, you can download it, or in the chat, ping us an email and, we'll get a copy of that Salesforce DevOps survey to you. So thank you for joining us.
We've set the scene here for DevOps, but there are some fantastic sessions across the rest of the day. And at the end, we've got a a panel session with some real experts of DevOps. I'm delighted to be hosting that. So please join.
Stick around. Get some real value out of the sessions, and I'll see you at the panel session at the end.
Yeah. I'd just like to echo what Ian said. I hope you've all enjoyed the session. Love some feedback. Enjoy the rest of the summit, and please do get in touch if you'd like to speak to me about DevOps on your team and and how to improve. Thank you very much.
