Planview have grown in DevOps maturity thanks to Gearset
Planview provides a suite of software solutions to help companies manage projects and portfolios more effectively. The platform supports over 4,500 customers globally to help them manage digital transformation, excel at innovation, and scale effectively.
The team at Planview have been using Gearset since 2022 and have been maturing their DevOps practices over this time. Starting from no processes at all, Planview now use Gearset for all their deployments, automation, sandbox seeding, and backup. They’re also currently in the process of moving over CPQ deployments from another tool to Gearset.
Salesforce has been Planview’s CRM of choice for over 4 years with the development team supporting over 1,500 end-users. The company is growing quickly with teams based in locations across the world — the largest presence in the US and also India.
The Business Applications team is managed by Satish Osuri and is made up of 5 admins, 4 developers, 4 business analysts and 3 other managers. Satish and his team look after the permissions and access for anyone onboarding and off-boarding in the company, as well as any Salesforce enhancements requested by end-users.
No formal processes for deploying metadata
Before Gearset, Satish explained that the team didn’t have any tools for deploying metadata and were making changes straight into their production org with “no formal structure or process”.
Without a Salesforce team in place, Satish says that a formal process wasn’t needed. As the team grew, they started to use change sets — but now with such a large team and multiple developers all deploying blindly into production, change sets wasn’t solving the problem they were trying desperately to fix.
“Our developers began overwriting each other. It all became a big mess and we just had no idea what code was actually being deployed.”
Satish and the team knew they needed a different solution and while they took the time to find a solution, they started to be very careful with the changes they were making. Because Satish and the team are dealing with permissions and access to certain parts of the Salesforce platform, there is a security and compliance duty to uphold and there isn’t any room for error.
“On top of all this, the biggest challenge was not having an audit. Once you start putting code in production that causes some concern, there’s no guarantee that you can ever go back.”
The Planview team was pushed to the point where they had to start looking for a deployment tool that they could trust and that could scale with their growing team.
Finding Gearset
Having started his Salesforce journey in 2010, Satish has been used to deploying with change sets for a long time. The discovery of Gearset as a deployment tool happened in a previous role and Satish hasn’t looked back since.
Satish and the team completed onboarding with Gearset and it was a quick and easy process. He said: “For someone like me who has been used to having no process for 14 years, Gearset is really great”.
“We’ve started to really tidy up the process. I have one person who has super admin permissions and they’re the only one in charge of pushing code to production. We’re following proper code guidelines and making sure that we adhere to best practices.”
Satish is happy knowing that when someone new joins the team, they can quickly get to grips with using Gearset’s friendly UI. When Planview adopted Gearset, they started only deploying from their UAT org to production, and quickly began using Gearset for their whole process.
“With Gearset I can confidently see the entire deployment history of any change we’ve ever made.”
See everything at a glance
The Planview team has 5 development environments which feed into 2 QA environments. From here they deploy into an integration, UAT and then their production environment.
Satish loves Gearset’s comparison feature, saying that he can “see everything at a glance including all changes and the API version too”.
“Deployments are so much easier, feel more comfortable and much faster — pretty much immediate!”
Planview’s use of Gearset doesn’t stop there; they’re also in the process of switching to Gearset for all of their CPQ deployments.
Communicating the business case for backup
When Planview’s renewal came around for Gearset, they were so comfortable and happy with the deployment tool, that they decided to explore the backup solution too. Satish says that it wasn’t easy to convince senior stakeholders to move away from their backup provider, but it was by far the right choice.
“Our leadership team were a little nervous moving away from Own as we’d used them for 4 years. But I presented my technical analysis to the team — and we decided it made perfect sense to switch.”
Thankfully, the Planview team have yet to use their backups but are happy knowing that their data and metadata is safe, in case they need to restore their orgs unexpectedly. Satish said he “can sit back and relax knowing that I can go back to a previous version!”.
A partnership with a bright future
Gearset’s support has always been a great help to Satish and the Planview team. Although they don’t have to use the feature often, when they do the response is immediate and solves the problem. Satish said that it feels like “a partnership between Planview and Gearset.”
“I talk about Gearset to all my friends. Some of them use other deployment tools but I know how beneficial it is to have Gearset — so I make sure they know too.”
