Reaching DevOps maturity as the technology leader in law
Overview
Morgan & Morgan is an innovator in the legal industry. With Salesforce at the center of its operations, it’s no wonder the development team is incredibly busy. The company receives thousands of legal claims every day, so it’s vital that Salesforce is agile and works well for the 800 attorneys who are renowned for acting quickly to help their clients.
Headed up by Platforms Solutions Manager, Jeb Garrott, the Salesforce admin/solutions and deployment team have spearheaded the implementation of the DevOps process that the entire Salesforce development team now follows.
A few years ago, the team realized that their process wasn’t working and a dedicated Salesforce DevOps solution was needed. Morgan & Morgan spent some time with another solution before switching to Gearset and seeing immediate success. The team quickly became reliant on Gearset’s metadata deployment solution to be able to release to Salesforce up to 16 times each month.
Lead times started to take a hit
The development team is currently made up of 12 admins, 5 developers and 6 QATs who work in 2-week sprint cycles – with 6 or 8 deployments each sprint.
When Jeb first joined the development team at Morgan & Morgan, there were only 4 admins who made their changes using change sets. “We were using a Google sheet that everyone would update on deployment nights to show which components needed to be deployed. The release manager would then go into the document and manually pick the individual items we wanted to deploy.”
“We only had one sandbox so the flow was just from sandbox to production. That’s it. No UAT or anything. Then we expanded the team and realized we couldn’t keep maintaining this workflow.”
Once the team grew, it became obvious a new tool was needed and the team took their first dive into DevOps. “We adopted another solution but it didn’t work for us. It was quite an ‘all or nothing’ approach and we began having some issues. Our lead time also began to take a hit and we weren’t able to deliver what the business expected.”
With just weeks until their contract was due to be renewed, Jeb and the team began looking for another solution to help them achieve the success with DevOps.
From first demo to fully onboarded – in three weeks
In the spring of 2021, Morgan & Morgan decided to adopt Gearset. Jeb remembers that the whole process was very different to any other company they’d approached.
“With other companies we always had a sales rep and a sales engineer. But with Gearset we have a very knowledgeable account manager in Matt who knows the product inside out and is able to get into the concepts and understand how we work. It really makes me feel comfortable with the product knowing how comfortable he is with it.”
Jeb’s team works very closely together so it was important that everyone was happy with the switch to Gearset. Once the whole team was bought in, the whole process – from the initial demo to onboarding – only took three weeks.
“The whole process was all very fluid with no smoke and mirrors. It really was a great experience. It’s the best onboarding experience I’ve ever had.”
Gearset makes changes happen in less than an hour
When the team first started using Gearset they had an “org first” approach. Jeb said, “we were using the feature branches to deploy directly into the orgs and then using a CI job to sync into the repo. The repo was acting more like a backup. Now we have a ‘Git first’ model and two months ago we committed to Gearset’s pipelines”.
Switching to any new software platform has its own challenges especially when you have 18 team members making changes in the same environment. But with Gearset, the Morgan & Morgan team are now able to visualize and see their entire workflow at a glance, inside the Gearset UI. Jeb smiles, “the ability to see what changes are waiting to go to production is huge”.
“A small manual change in the other solution would take us 4-5 hours and in Gearset we can get it done in an hour – maybe less than an hour.”
Jeb remembers an issue recently where a change was made directly in production: “If this had happened before Gearset it would’ve been a huge deal for us to try and get back on track, but now we can see everything in the change monitoring history and can quickly and easily fix the problem”.
For Jeb, it was important to have a third-party tool outside of Salesforce.
“I don’t want my whole DevOps process running out of Salesforce. It can feel a bit frantic and clunky so having a third-party platform feels so much better – plus the Gearset UI is a lot more user-friendly.”
Goals to get lead times down to just 4 hours for priority requests
Jeb says the team is happier since implementing Gearset, “even though we’re probably doing more changes than ever. Communication is a big focus for the team and Gearset keeps that going by giving an easy-to-navigate interface with all visible changes and tickets, right in front of you”.
Working together as a partnership
The Morgan & Morgan team pride themselves on working together and being great communicators. When working with Gearset, the partnership is two-way, leading to open discussions about how we can help each other.
“Lead time at the moment is a little over a day. My goal is to get that down to 4 hours for priority requests – and with Gearset I think that can happen.”
Jeb enjoys talking to the Gearset team and has made a few suggestions which have been quickly implemented into the platform’s UI. “I mentioned a possible change based around validation visibility and within a week there it was in the app! The Gearset team is so responsive to requests and the customer service is truly game-changing.”
“It’s phenomenal that I’m able to talk to someone in the live chat and send images of my screen right on the same page as you’re working through a deployment.”
If the team hadn’t moved to Gearset, Jeb says that they “would still be on 2 deployments a week, which is still pretty good – but not as many as we need to keep up with our goals to be the technology leader in law”.
Morgan & Morgan saw value from Gearset immediately. Jeb remembers the speed at which they could get changes out was amazing: “The response was instant!”.
“We are now deploying 16 times a month. Without Gearset, we wouldn’t have been able to keep up with the demand from the business to continue to grow and continue to be reactive.”
