Introduction
In the contemporary world, organizations need to embrace the Salesforce DevOps culture if they wish to keep up with the rapid pace of app and platform improvements to remain competitive and cybersecure in 2021 and beyond.
Salesforce DevOps continues to prove its value by blending the benefits of both software development and IT operations to deliver new applications swifter and with more robust quality than ever before. The crux of an effective Salesforce DevOps strategy is creating shared collaboration and ownership across software development and IT operations for code produced and apps launched.
Today, every organization is competing against shorter time-to-market schedules than ever. Furthermore, there is a need for real-time responses to counter the threat of cyberattacks, targeting the core executables of cybersecurity monitoring platforms and tools. There is an added responsibility and pressure on IT platforms to deliver real-time responses to threats. The best way to be more competitive in any market is to be swifter than your competitors in cashing in on new customer opportunities. Given the dynamic nature of today’s markets, there’s no time to waste in outsmarting the competitors when it comes to creating customer-facing apps that serve prospects and customers better. Salesforce DevOps delivers robust competitive strength to any organization that embraces it and makes it a core part of its DNA. A typical Salesforce DevOps team in a $500M+ organization has more than 200 concurrent projects in progress, with over 70% of them devoted to protecting and enhancing customer experiences.
Speed and quality have never been more critical to the core Salesforce DevOps DNA of organizations as they are in the contemporary world. Organizations wishing to achieve speed and quality productivity need to begin with a clear strategy for automating the six areas of Salesforce DevOps. These six areas usually begin with ‘Build and Test’ on the DevOps side. On the IT Operations side, Deployment, Release, Operations and Monitoring demonstrate the greatest potential for automation today.
6 Reasons Why Every Organization Needs a Salesforce DevOps Strategy
Reason#1: Increases Productivity Due to Streamlined Business Processes
The traditional method of waterfall model of software development included handing over of the software from one team to another. This multiplied the probability of errors and decelerated the process of development. The biggest benefit of Salesforce DevOps is that the collaboration among several teams streamlines the business processes, leading to a boost in productivity. Real-time changes to the code can be embedded, and issues and opportunities can be identified at a primary stage. The swift incorporation of changes leads to low application downtime, while increasing the productivity of all stakeholders involved in the development process. It promotes close and swift working, bringing in efficiency in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
Reason#2: Fosters Innovation & Enables Digital Re-invention of Organizations
Salesforce DevOps leads to streamlining of processes, more efficient releases, and ensures quality builds. As the deployment phases are more flexible, the teams get more rest, and there is tremendous opportunity to bring an innovative approach to resolve issues. Salesforce DevOps enables teams to foster innovation and creativity, leading to happier, engaged, and a more productive workforce. The vital aspects of the Salesforce DevOps model, which are automated deployments and standardized production environments, make deployments predictable and liberate people from everyday repeated tasks to enable them to do more creative things.
Salesforce DevOps model can also increase customer loyalty and Lifetime Customer Value (LCV) for an organization, while providing it an opportunity to reinvent themselves digitally. What’s required is a model that allows them to deliver an ultimate customer experience, automate customer transactions, and support automation everywhere. Salesforce DevOps allows organizations to innovate with greater speed, compared to their competitors, by enabling the agility, customer-focus, and actionable insights integral to accomplishing data-driven business results.
Reason#3: Leads to Quality Software Development Due to Early Diagnosis of Defects
Defects in the software pose the greatest threat to your application. Salesforce DevOps enables early diagnosis of defects in the code and their resolution at a significantly swifter rate, leading to improvement in the overall quality of software. Collaboration and constant communication between various stakeholders, modular programming and repetitive development result in the development of a software product that is durable and of superior quality. The collaborative Salesforce DevOps environment promotes a culture of knowledge sharing across different teams. The automated, incessant monitoring and regular testing of the code help enhance the overall build quality. Teams are encouraged to share their feedback with one other to ensure early diagnosis of defects and subsequent resolution. Since the business side does not have to wait for the inclusion of the feedback received and changes being made at short notice, stricter quality control measures can be followed, leading to a product that delivers an enhanced user experience.
Moreover, measurable gains in code quality and software quality assurance that detect bugs in code before it is released to customers shrink the high costs of customer service, code patches and in some cases, interchanging apps completely. When code is developed repeatedly using Salesforce DevOps, bugs are found faster and more easily eliminated from a codebase. The error detection zone becomes more effective in stopping bad code from being released.
Reason#4: Enhances Collaboration Leading to Greater Employee Satisfaction
A seamless and more transparent business process that fosters collaboration among the employees directly leads to a happier workplace. The better the communication and collaboration of the team, the greater is their efficiency and work satisfaction. Promoting a positive work environment improves employee morale. Each team member is equally responsible for contributing to the continuous delivery chain, which ultimately strengthens the entire team. This leads to a culture of trust among the team, where every individual is motivated, resulting in better employee satisfaction and greater productivity. It also meets the quality expectations, which is delivered in a timely manner and expands the business growth.
Greater collaboration across Development, IT Operations, Finance, Sales and Executive Management bridges the gaps in financial reporting, particularly when it involves development of new apps. Salesforce DevOps increases communication across the entire organization, preventing exorbitant mistakes when applications are initially being created or patched. Successful implementation of the Salesforce DevOps strategy is a comprehensive phenomenon encompassing the entire organization. It not only requires the involvement of all stakeholders but also the adoption of a Salesforce DevOps culture and embracing the lean and agile principles. Talented Salesforce DevOps engineers can help the organization achieve success faster.
Reason#5: Boosts Customer Experience & Consumer Satisfaction
When the development is better and happens at a swifter rate, customer satisfaction automatically improves. Salesforce DevOps team can better serve customers and incorporate customer feedback swifter in the prospective product iterations, leading to enhanced customer satisfaction. Salesforce DevOps allows product teams to explore more opportunities to excel in every realm of customer experience, further igniting new product ideas and completely new businesses that enable organic revenue growth. It enables engineering, manufacturing, sales and marketing to share a single, integrated customer view. Salesforce DevOps leads to improved speed and efficacy in responding to customer needs not only proactively, but also reactively. A satisfied and engaged customer base is directly associated with higher return on investment and bigger business gains.
Reason#6: Saves Millions of Dollars Annually Via Scale & Transparency
Salesforce DevOps can bring greater scale, accountability, and visibility to IT Operations, saving millions of dollars annually in avoidable downtime expenses. The consistency Salesforce DevOps delivers to the SDLC minimizes the possibility for code changes to impact production. According to the IT Process Institute Visible Ops Handbook, about 80% of unplanned production outages were because of improperly planned changes to production systems of IT operations. According to Gartner, people and process issues cause up to 80% of outages affecting mission-critical services. According to IDC’s ‘DevOps and the Cost of Downtime: Fortune 1000 Best Practice Metrics Quantified Study,’ the average hourly cost of failure of a critical application is between $0.5 million to $1 million, while the cost of unplanned application downtime for a usual Fortune 1000 company was up to $1.25 billion in lost sales and productivity.1 Thus, adoption of Salesforce DevOps practices can literally save an organization millions of dollars annually.
Conclusion
Adoption of Salesforce DevOps practices bestows innumerable benefits to different stakeholders within the organization, including the development team, IT operations team, and business owners. Business owners expect that the time and efforts expended in implementing Salesforce DevOps within their organization should bring them measurable business returns.
The measurable results obtained by adopting Salesforce DevOps practices into the business framework serve as a driving force that boosts the idea of a Salesforce DevOps environment. Salesforce DevOps is all about a seamless collaboration between the development and the operations teams. It fundamentally helps in creating a highly active development environment that works parallelly with the business requirements. According to research by Coleman Parkes, 81% of business executives believe that Agile and Salesforce DevOps are critical to digital transformation of businesses and 4 out of 5 organizations presently use these practices to some extent.
About CloudFulcrum
With its mission of “DevOps as a Service,” CloudFulcrum has been a part of multiple successful Salesforce implementations worldwide, with satisfied customers in BFSI, Healthcare, Retail, Real Estate, and Technology verticals.
With our Salesforce DevOps consulting, we help enterprises align their Digital Transformation goals to achieve higher efficiency, faster time-to-market, and better quality of software builds with early identification of arising issues, enabling continuous release of Salesforce applications.
1 Louis Columbus, “10 Reasons Why Every Enterprise Needs a DevOps Strategy in 2021,” https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2021/02/21/10-reasons-why-everyenterprise-needs-a-devops-strategy-in-2021/?sh=3fb6d6af4f9c Feb 21, 2021.
2 Dr. Vinati Kamani, “8 Benefits of Adopting a DevOps Strategy in 2020,” https://arkenea.com/blog/benefits-of-devops/.
