Norstella derisked Salesforce delivery with a mature DevOps process
For many organizations, creating a new org on Salesforce can be a struggle, riddled with deployment errors and other difficulties, and using manual processes to do so makes this even more chaotic. Norstella, a company made up of pharmaceutical solutions providers that offer a full range of consultancy services and solutions, was facing this exact challenge. Following its acquisition of Citeline from Informa, Norstella needed to implement a new Salesforce org to support 450 end users.
Working with Gearset, here’s how Norstella delivered its new Salesforce org and created a mature Salesforce DevOps process at speed.
Bringing order out of chaos during implementation
Norstella already had three Salesforce orgs through previous acquisitions, and its technology team was tasked with standing up a new org as a part of consolidating systems. Working with consultants from Craftware, the Norstella team succeeded in creating a highly integrated architecture between the CRM and many other systems within nine months. But the process wasn’t always pretty.
“It was organized chaos,” says Chris Fowles, Norstella’s Senior Director of Technology, who came from Informa and has led the implementation project.
“Deployments were like whack-a-mole. You had a problem to the left, so you deployed code, and a problem from six months ago would reappear on the right. It was really frustrating.”
Chris Fowles
For much of the nine-month build phase of the new org, just one member of the consultant team was responsible for deploying components. “It was completely manual,” says Grant Roessler, who oversees the architecture of the org, explained. “She’d have massive struggles with deployment errors or need to comment out code — all sorts of craziness.”
Grant and Raúl Chamorro joined the Norstella team midway through the project and began to evaluate deployment options, ruling out DevOps Center and Prodly, which the consultants were using for CPQ deployments but hadn’t been able to deploy to production. The team also ruled out CircleCI and Copado, which would have taken too long to implement, didn’t support deploying CPQ as easily as metadata, and wouldn’t support the team’s release process without a high risk of overwriting changes. They needed something that would work for both admins and devs, without someone managing the deployment setup full-time.
The team quickly found that Gearset supported both devs and admins, could deploy CPQ alongside metadata, and helped them get started quickly. For the last month of the implementation project, the team used Gearset to activate production. Once the org was live, the team immediately set about improving their DevOps process to support Norstella’s ongoing CRM requirements.
Achieving DevOps maturity in months
Norstella’s new Salesforce org is now 13 months old. Within that time, the team has built a comprehensive process for their DevOps lifecycle, managing metadata and data through Gearset. The team was able to move from chaotic manual deployments to a mature process in just a matter of months.
“We really wanted Gearset as a tool to manage our deployments and the full end-to-end DevOps process.” Chris says.
“I would strongly argue the org we have now is better than the org we had before, which was seven years old.”
Chris Fowles
Norstella’s leaders appreciated the importance of a well-documented process and good governance, so the Norstella team was able to continuously improve and adopt more best practices. They began by building out a CI/CD pipeline, which they optimized over time (for example, making a switch to back-promote from production instead of UAT). Where one admin had been doing all CPQ data deployments, the team now uses Gearset for CPQ so that all configuration is deployed through the same pipeline.
“That’s been a critical thing for us: aligning the deployment process for metadata and CPQ so everything works the same,” Chris says.
Backups came early on. “It was really easy — you just turn it on,” Grant remembers. “It’s important to have that security in case anything happens. And it’s great to have high-frequency backups for critical objects.” The team also seeds sandboxes using Gearset, so dev environments have test data to work with.
The team releases weekly, with a high degree of predictability about which work items will be shipped each week. Features are decoupled so they can usually be deployed independently. “The team gets through an incredible amount of work, and Gearset supports that process.” Chris says.
“We’ve released 250 tickets to production in the last three months, and I could count on one hand the number of problems we’ve introduced in a year. With a brand-new org and a brand-new team working at pace, that’s incredible — it’s fantastic. And Gearset is in the middle of that, with bright people around the outside.”
Chris Fowles
The Norstella team is confident in the process they’ve built. “Source control is our source of truth, and we have complete confidence in it,” Grant says. “I’m not worried that any of our environments are out of sync. We all use Gearset, so we know we’re safe.”
Reducing risk and creating confidence
The main objective in Norstella’s DevOps journey has been implementing process to mitigate risk. The business uses Salesforce for a range of critical operations. For example, the org’s CPQ model automatically determines customers’ access to their products. Invoices, commissions, and more are also driven from the org. “When we go live, the risk goes from none to tons.” Chris explains.
“If we didn’t have access to Gearset for a week, it’d bring our business to a standstill in terms of deployments.”
Chris Fowles
Sometimes success is measured in silence. Norstella’s business leaders have been impressed by the governance and process his team has put in place, asking no questions about it, Chris says. When it comes to the wider business, his team is working hard to limit the time end users spend on an action in Salesforce, and to surface the right data in intelligent ways.
“If we do everything perfectly, we hear nothing,” Chris says. “If we do something wrong, we hear a lot. It has not been noisy for a long time. No one complains that we don’t work quickly enough, ever. No one complains that the quality isn’t good enough. No one complains that our system is buggy.”
Partnering with Gearset for continued success
For Norstella, Gearset isn’t just a platform. The product and success teams at Gearset deliver both strategic improvements and support as soon as they need it. “On most platforms you just don’t bother, but with Gearset I don’t hesitate to raise a ticket,” Grant says “Within five or ten minutes I’m chatting to someone and we get it fixed easily.”
From their earliest demos, Norstella noticed Gearset’s focus on understanding and solving their team’s unique requirements. They’ve worked closely with their CSM and the product team at Gearset to keep improving the platform and their process.
“Pretty much everything we’ve discussed has been delivered or is being delivered. It’s incredible. I’ve never worked with any vendor like that,” Grant says. Chris agrees. “Gearset’s approach to customer service stands out,” he says.
“It goes a long way to know that you’re listening to our problems. And you’re building your product around solving business problems. We feel part of your roadmap, and that makes a material difference. I hold Gearset as a gold-standard vendor because of the experience you’re giving us in terms of product development and engaging with us.”
Chris Fowles
