Delivering Salesforce at scale
In October 2019, Intellect began their Salesforce implementation journey for SJP. The task was to enhance the experience for SJP’s advisers and clients through one of the largest Financial Services Cloud (FSC) implementations, initially supporting 4000 advisors and 10,000+ users.
To realise this vision, a robust DevOps process was built by SJP along with Intellect team including Amit Kumar Tiwari (Head of Salesforce Architecture and Practice), supported by Siva Kumar Reddy (Salesforce Environment Manager), Tejes Mahajan (DevOps Architect) to support the initial rollout, and scale with the ambitions of SJP.
A large team with an ambitious client
Over 150 people from Intellect are working on SJP’s Salesforce implementation, including a diverse mix of admins, developers, consultants, architects, business analysts and testers — designing a robust solution that catered to a wide range of DevOps and deployment expertise was tricky.
In addition, SJP also aimed to release biweekly to provide outstanding solutions to over 4,800 advisors ensuring their clients receive accurate, reliable financial advice.
“There’s always been the desire from SJP to release every two weeks at a minimum. But it just wasn’t possible with the old processes and native tooling.”
Initially, the process relied on change sets, cherry-picking components to build packages from scratch, which was manual, time consuming and error prone. “It took us a day and a half just to build the package for deployment. Using change sets was not cool!”
With Gearset, a biweekly cadence and plans towards releasing on demand are in place.
“The biweekly sprint cadence can now be met, even with the heightened sanity checks, testing requirements, and following strict processes, plans are now underway to be able to release fixes on demand which was inconceivable before Gearset.”
Being agile and security conscious
Security is paramount to all teams, but particularly those in financial services. Service interruptions or bugs can cause irreparable damage to company reputation, and lead to regulatory scrutiny.
By implementing Gearset, Intellect team is able to release with confidence more frequently. As a result, improved processes for successful deployments and robust security practices have been established at Intellect and SJP.
“The time Gearset has freed up during deployments has allowed improvement in processes, introducing thorough vulnerability scanning and business verification of our new features.”
But that’s not all! Gearset’s flexibility in helping meet initial testing requirements has been invaluable.
“One of the key features for us straight away was Gearset’s automated testing, code scanning, and monitoring. From the start we were able to identify and remediate issues proactively, and faster than ever before — and we’re able to make sure all code being shipped meets our standards, first time!”
Smart tools that scale
DevOps is a continual journey of improvement. Like the Salesforce platform, DevOps practices and tooling evolve.
Gearset is a rich platform that offers a way for teams to move away from change sets quickly with Compare & Deploy. They’re then able to grow into advanced DevOps Pipelines to easily visualise and automate their processes. This is what Intellect has been able to do at SJP.
“Implementing Gearset Pipelines required a cultural shift and rigorous discipline. There was some initial resistance, but the benefits and growth we’ve seen in the product have been fantastic.”
The success at SJP stems from the Intellect process created with Gearset’s product development and commitment.
“Implementing Pipelines allowed a move to feature-based releases. Only approved user stories are now promoted to higher environments and production. Precision deployments in Pipelines have enabled more granular deployments and avoidance of messy merge conflicts. It’s a game changer!”
Creating valuable partnerships
When you’re looking to overhaul your processes, especially in such a large team, there are often challenges. A lot of these challenges stem from overcoming the pain of change, and challenging the status quo. With a large team it’s also imperative that any new process and technology you bring in supports the long-term vision of the company and that all the organisations that you partner with are invested in your success. That’s what Intellect has found with Gearset.
“Matt Dickens and Gearset’s product team have been with us all the way. They’ve been in front of us every month, discussing our challenges and paving the way with us. It’s been a real partnership!”
Creating a dialogue and being invested in your business relationships — especially when discussing a roadmap — is hugely important. As a user-driven company, Gearset has taken onboard feedback from Intellect / SJP to contribute to the success of the Gearset platform for everyone in the Salesforce ecosystem.
“The responsive support from Gearset and the ability to adapt to the specific needs, such as integrating security tools like SonarQube, are crucial to ongoing success.”
A positive impact on business
Purchasing software should always result in positive business outcomes. The automations and efficiency improvements introduced by Gearset have allowed Intellect to focus more on development rather than deployment logistics. This shift has enabled the team to be more successful and deliver great experiences.
“Partnering with Gearset has been transformative for our deployment processes. It brings in agility and precision to our Salesforce implementation. Gearset’s commitment to our success and their adaptive approach to our unique needs have been invaluable. Its advanced DevOps capabilities have not only streamlined our operations but also fortified our security measures, ensuring we maintain the highest standards of service. This collaboration exemplifies the power of strategic partnerships in driving innovation and excellence.”
Hari Menon — SJP Client Director at Intellect Design Arena
