Description
Join Jack McCurdy (DevOps Advocate at Gearset) in this webinar as he delves into the data from the State Of Salesforce DevOps survey results from tech companies to provide key insights into how companies like yours are using Salesforce DevOps. We’ll discover the specific challenges these Salesforce teams are facing, how teams are performing, what DevOps practices they’re using and their goals for 2023.
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Transcript
So let's get started. Thanks once again for joining us for the state of Salesforce DevOps twenty twenty three. Insights into the tech industry.
We are very pleased and very excited every year to be able to produce this insight into how Salesforce professionals are approaching delivery of Salesforce.
And we designed the state of Salesforce DevOps survey to gain as much knowledge that we can about how real teams are adopting and what their experiences are when it comes to their Salesforce delivery lifecycle and DevOps.
And over twelve hundred Salesforce professionals this year took the survey, took part, helped us identify what the key trends in the ecosystem are. As well as pinpoint in particular pinpoints challenges and blockers that they are facing towards adopting better ways of working. So the purpose of this webinar is to dive into data from the tech industry and respondents from the tech industry. In particular, and see what we can learn and give you some pointers as to what you might be able to do next as you look to either refine your processes, continue building on your processes, or even get started on that initial journey.
Today, you are joined by me. So my name is Jack McCurdy. I am a DevOps advocate here at Geerset. I spent the last four years at Geerset working with customers of all ships and sizes, spend a bunch of time as an account executive in the early days working primarily with tech customers as well as health care and life science customers.
So varied experience there. Customers of all ships and sizes.
And I've spent the last year or so working with customers perspective.
Respect DevOps professionals in the Salesforce space, and helping share knowledge best practices with the industry about what they can do to adapt better ways of working. I'm also joined by a couple of my colleagues. They are looking after the chat box and q and a box, and that is Holly and Ash. If you have any comments, please feel free to use those places for those comments and they will be happy to help out either live or if you have any questions that we wanna answer at the end. Then use the q and a box for that. We can do it.
So with the Salesforce ecosystem, the way it is everybody sees Salesforce as critical to achieving all if not the majority, if not all of their business goals. So Fortunatelyly that has an impact on Salesforce teams themselves. So ninety eight percent of respondents to the survey from tech companies said that demand on their Salesforce dev teams have increased in the last year, which I don't think is particularly on prizing statistic, I think this tells us a lot. Organisations do not look to Salesforce to be a glorified spreadsheet they look to Salesforce to be the enabler and a catalyst for business growth, and that will help them execute bespoke business processes and workflows that are going to be reducing friction for both their end users that they're serving and ultimately their customers.
So this is why I'm bouncing around all over the place. So this is why demand on Salesforce professionals is increasing And it's likely to increase as we navigate a largely unstable macroeconomic climate right now that we're faced with. So companies will be making plans to do more with less and as such they'll be looking at Salesforce and maximizing their investment in Salesforce to do that and thus increasing the pressure on those Salesforce professionals. So Salesforce professionals are hugely important test for business and ninety eight percent of those response in the tech industry said so, which is largely enterprise and statistic.
And overall, it appears that tech companies are experiencing more complexity across the board than other series, especially when it comes to the amount of custom codes that they have and the increased number of integrations.
That they might have in Salesforce as well. And that complexity does drive challenges when it comes to delivery Salesforce in a streamlined and effective manner and how the DevOps process is put together.
In comparison to the wider report, where forty one percent of organizations were adding more custom code.
We can see here in the tech industry that fifty nine percent of organizations are experiencing that. And while forty six percent overall have more integrations, sixty three percent of the tech companies did. And we can largely attribute that down to tech companies being first adopters of new technologies they're onboarding more users to use our systems and tech companies in general are gonna be at the forefront and are more likely to be looking to provide a more a stick overview of all of their data in Salesforce linking multiple platforms and providing the most seamless experience that they can.
There does seem to be a challenge with training professionals.
In Salesforce DevOps techniques and best practices amongst the tech industry though. So only twenty two percent of those surveyed in tech receive training every month in regards to their DevOps and regards to their Salesforce delivery process in total.
Twenty seven percent do once a quarter and twenty one percent don't do any training or don't have any formal training at all. So In comparison to other industries as well, tech is not prioritizing that training as much.
There is, however, the flip side to that and potentially that is because tech companies are used to the concept of DevOps. So in the survey as well. Most respondents say ninety seven percent of them said that DevOps is generally generally aligned with the wider company culture as well. So if you think about the tech industry, many producing applications themselves, generally invested in technology, those kind of delivery methods and functions are gonna be more baked into how that company works overall.
But DevOps itself is not traditionally familiar as a concept when it pertains to Salesforce. So we're going to dive into this customer a little bit later in the webinar, but Zometry, a leading artificial intelligence marketplace, had sophisticated process in other areas, but they had a manual and slow process with Salesforce before they actually put some investment into their DevOps process into learning more about it and investing in tooling and revamping what they were doing.
So That is doesn't get tick off lightly with what they have just because they do it in other areas. Doesn't mean that they're going to be doing it with Salesforce.
So they have found as well is the reasons tech companies have given for this is that their release processes are more difficult difficult to manage. The team lacks an experience limited buy in from decision makers and process changes that they've already made have failed to deliver. So that does beg the question could it be that more training on processes would not only upscale the team but ensure that processes are successful and create better buy in from decision makers. So that's where resources such as DevOps launch pads, specific training modules, etcetera could be crucial to the learning journey. And seeing better results from those.
Like other industries, tech companies think that training in CI and CD and automation would be the most beneficial but there is also a desire for the greater understanding of business value of DevOps. Something that I like to talk about quite a lot and you will probably be hearing a lot or about in the future. So to excel so If you look at the graph on the right hand side here, so something I mentioned in the last side is how DevOps aligns with a wider company culture. So With the tech industry, it is likely that a wider company culture is gonna be more invested in more DevOps ways of working.
Largely that comes down to collaboration and how teams rate collaboration. So what we have in this graph is how a team rates their level of collaboration from excellent to very poor, and then the graphs and the slides themselves they have rated their company's alignment with DevOps culture as very well, a mixed bag or not well at all. You can see there at the top that those that are rating our team's collaboration is excellent. DevOps culture aligns much more closely to that company culture for example.
So that's what that graph is explaining. Now, it's come down to a number of factors. So as an individual to excel in the tech industry, it's crucial the individual excellence exists within your team. I'm encouraging your team members to continuously develop their skills and expertise, stay up to date with Salesforce best practices, and pursuing relevant qualifications, certifications can be in themselves to make significant contributions to the devil's process itself.
And by empowering your team members to explore resources like Trailhead, DevOps launchpad that I've mentioned already and engage in those peer to peer learning sessions this continues that learning mindset, and they'll be able to embrace their knowledge and bring those abilities to deliver a high quality culture and team that is driven towards those best practices of delivery.
Speaking of the team, that team coordination is vital in tech So, Tech can have complex processes, multiple stakeholders are common. We've already mentioned how important integrations are. To the tech industry and the increasing complexity of those orgs. So by fostering a collaborative environment that encourages open communication, idea sharing and seamless coordination between teams not only team members but external teams as well.
That can have a real impact on how your team will deliver in the long run. So by encouraging things like regular stand ups and retrospectives and cross functional department collaboration to ensure that your business has alignment across all of those. We'll build a sense of shared responsibility by working together to a common goal and you can streamline your efforts in Salesforce DevOps to achieve better outcomes.
Business sponsorship, obtaining it is absolutely crucial to having successful Salesforce DevOps. So engaging key stakeholders, especially executives, business analysis, product owners, super users, power users, some might call them in their orgs, will work to connect the dots between business goals and your dev ops practices So great work alone without getting executive sponsorship and buy in, it's a difficult road and hard to sustain unless that is championed by an exec sponsor as well. So not only is it critical to involve business stakeholders in the process, but providing regular updates and progress demonstrating the value of what your team does and the impact of the work that it has. We'll create a culture of collaboration and shared ownership across that org championed by a figurehead that is outside of that team and somebody that can advocate for that team. Can be really powerful.
And everything that we do in in this space and everything that we use to support our jobs has tooling and process, so reliability and scalability are vital in any industry. It's important to strike a balance between relying on that individual contribution and that individual excellence that I just mentioned and implementing efficient tools and processes. So tools and processes are enablers and they're not the sole drivers of success. But if you promote the systematic use of those tools such as version control, automated testing, CI, CD, by implementing those best practices and having robustness in your process is going to minimize human error. So those tools ensure consistency, repeatability, and reduce the dependence on specific individuals, and that approach fosters that efficiency stability and allows TE members to focus on their high value activities where that individual excellence can shine through.
And then the last point that we have on here in terms of building that team is having governance. So establishing basic governance, which you might well do already in terms of the org and what you have built into it, building basic governance processes that involves the development teams, testers, the sponsors to stakeholders that have already mentioned, is essential for driving dead ops, a rhythm to your dead ops. And this can start with setting ground rules and expectations, and implementing measures where you can measure that those things are followed.
You know, tech businesses have to work extremely hard to build trust and support with their customers. So it's imperative that you have some governance in place in your internal processes that ensures that trust and support that you build is not tarnished by impacts to customer basic systems and the systems that your end users are on for interacting for interacting with customers as well. So governance whilst not so prevalence in tech as it might be to something like healthcare science or finance, governance can be really powerful when it comes to building that trust and garnering that trust and support that you need. From your end users.
So in the tech industry we found that the lack of experience does hold the majority of teams teams back.
The lack of experience does contribute to their release process being more difficult or a little bit more challenging. Maybe they're trying to run before they can walk when it comes to adopting things like burst control.
And that lack of experience can be can be damaging. So this is by learning and development and training becomes so important which we've already touched on. With the constant instruction of new Salesforce clouds, you know, AI being all the rage at the moment, being absolutely flooded with it, the three three times a year releases to the platform, it becomes harder and harder and harder to stay on top of new advancements in the platform in general. So what that means is DevOps often takes a backseat and is either not considered or is deprioritized, and that can become a vicious cycle and can contribute to a, we've always done it this way, and it works for now, attitude persisting.
And that's not gonna build experience, unfortunately, and that's not gonna contribute to ongoing success in your org. So it's important to balance that drive for innovation and to stay on top of what Salesforce is offering.
And you might find that you have more time to do that if you put some upfront investment into a DevOps process and getting the teams and real hands on experience with it so that you can implement these things and be able to deliver in a more seamless manner to focus on on that new learning. You're not gonna have time to learn everything. I think that's a battle that we all that we all have every time new releases come out, new clouds come out, etcetera, that knowledge is always gonna be there, but I think it's critical that We give Teams experience and allow ourselves shape and room to experience these things and put investment into these throughout the learning journey.
Not just in the new updates in Salesforce releases contain new clouds, etcetera.
Let's talk about and let's talk about ROI because ROI is the main thing that businesses are obsessed with, especially in tech. We're all about ROI, ROI ROI. And encouragingly, forty three percent tech companies are seeing return on investment of over ten thousand dollars per month by investing in their Salesforce DevOps processes, their tooling and how they deliver Salesforce, but that actually does lag behind the wider ecosystem which reported that fifty nine percent of respondents saw over ten thousand dollars a month ROI on investing in it.
This could probably be for a few reasons. For instance, the complexities of working in large enterprise, a lot large tech enterprises operate on Salesforce and are invested in it. Can mean that it's really challenging to nail down an ROI figure or that what I think is probably more likely is primary value for those teams is accelerating digital transformation and accelerating digital transformation is really hard to attribute a dollar value to when it comes to the DevOps process itself.
But I'm gonna find out in just a wee minute here DebOps does provide really concrete evidence that continuous delivery and the methods that you can implement by doing DevOps provides a really solid foundations for driving transformation faster which businesses are obsessed with. So I think that whilst forty four percent aren't sure on the dollar amount they're saving, that is largely attributed to. They want to see results.
Faster and drive digital transformation and drive change through what they're doing. So whilst that lies behind in terms of what the wider ecosystem reported, I don't think that that's anything to be too particularly shocked by. So the main thing is however that even those teams aren't sure on the dollar return or seeing ROI from their processes. It's just there isn't a dollar amount tied to it. And these figures should go a long way when trying to convince decision makers of the value of DevOps and getting executive sponsorship and buy in.
It won't just make them set up and listen, but will hopefully inspire action too.
So IT departments have traditionally been seen as cost centers.
Maybe less so in tech, but traditionally that is that is the way that the world has worked until now. So, that has contributed to us seeing these methods and tying DevOps to it. But with Salesforce DevOps, you do have the opportunity to shift that perception and precision IT strategic driver of value off the back of what I was just saying about ROI. DevOps enables faster delivery of high quality solutions improves customer experiences. It drives business outcomes that are unique to the space your technology serves.
And by showcasing the value of your DevOps practices, you can change the perception of your IT team, and position it as a valuable asset that drives success of the business. So across the various areas that we have here, Tech companies top business priorities for twenty twenty three were to consolidate systems and processes, they were to improve flexibility to meet internal business needs, and become more cost efficient.
So taking that first one consolidating system processes, DevOps enhances collaboration, which creates Unifin by creating a unified development pipeline which will promote those systems and processes and consolidation. So DevOps absolutely does do that for us.
If we're talking about improving the flexibility to meet internal business needs, continuous delivery allows depth in DevOps allows businesses to adapt swiftly to changing requirements and it improves the flexibility for us to pivot to internal and external needs when they arise.
And of course we all want to become more cost efficient, but that is one of the big things. And Salesforce DevOps reduces the total cost of ownership by improving that collaboration by reducing rework and automating tasks. So, robust DevOps processes contribute hugely to that cost efficiency. That we're gonna need and more businesses will be demanding.
And systems dev ops is mission critical to what we are doing as a system. So, systems and processes that support operations build this category, absolutely. The graph is showing showing us here that are your team responsible for Salesforce backups, and sixty three percent said, yes, for both metadata and metadata, seven percent just for data there, and judgment stays six percent and no was eighteen percent. I am an absolutely huge advocate that you're mission critical business systems, especially Salesforce, and it should be looked after by the Salesforce team as well.
By building a robust process and having robustness baked into a great dev ops process, it's gonna mean that you stay safe and secure. We talked about establishing trust and establishing resilience with our customers internally and externally. That means downtime or issues can have significant sequences.
So anytime that we're trying to migrate to new systems or platforms or integrate those new systems or platforms can be complex and risky. And if something goes wrong, we need to be in a position where we are able to recover and restore in a safe and reliable manner. So bringing that in house to a Salesforce team is critically important.
Along with things like testing, along with reducing the manual steps with automation, all of these things play into a mission critical system and maintaining a mission critical system through best practices.
So if that is not something that you are currently doing or it's not something that's currently owned, it's owned by Central IT or elsewhere, I would seriously consider having your data disaster recovery and testing solutions owned in house by a Salesforce team. Or at least having the methodologies baked in through best practices and communication and collaboration that those lines and channels things are tested and the communication channels are open between you all so that that is frictionless should disaster arise because disaster does arise, unfortunately, it happens to the best of us, it's not a case of when disasters will disaster strike it, it's just a case of when So let's make sure that we are in a position to do that, and we have a secure backup or our data, we have a secure backup of our metadata too.
So let's come back to the case study that I mentioned earlier. So Across the report, since implementing Salesforce DevOps teams have achieved sixty five percent say that they have saved time, fifty eight percent improved quality of their releases and fifty five percent released more frequently.
I mentioned theometry earlier the AI marketplace. So they are a gear set customer and pre gear set, they had a painful manual process compared to development in other areas of their platform. So customized in their Salesforce instances were slow, dependent on those manual processes, and they also had a lack of visibility. So the team had this skills to build their own CI and CD tool chains with gitlab and GitHub, but no visibility to see what was going on other than poor requests.
So this caused the team of developers doing admin work to help the increasing number of users. So So by having more visibility into your process, there's no duplication of that work, there's nothing that's going to crop up everybody's bought into that. And implementing gear set enabled them to make deployments more quickly too. So that fifty five percent figure of releasing more quickly applied to those folks in the Zometry team and releasing more frequently and having visibility into the status of the work being deployed along the pipeline help them view Salesforce as an effective development platform, bringing it in line with the rest of the company's development and technology stack and that's really important for demonstrating the value of Salesforce and the value of Salesforce team, especially in an industry that is already used to working in best practices manners.
So bridging that gap between software companies familiar with the language of DevOps and those in the Salesforce ecosystem who are generally less experienced with DevOps tooling in process that's been highly beneficial to Zometry's company culture.
So achieving maturity in Devox practices is an ongoing process, which is gonna evolve.
It has unique challenges across every business, involves gradual adoption of best practices, automation, cultural changes, getting started can be absolutely daunting, but teams should start with a specific project or an area that can benefit from DevOps and gradually expand that into other areas. Spocus on your specific challenges or threats of technology such as quality delivery and establishing trust, establishing those things in your process can be hugely beneficial, think about code scanning and things like that, having a robustness, backup solution and then being able to iterate on your tech customers feedback fast and that will come through your things like automation.
Engage your key stakeholders and make sure there's alignment so that you can address any concerns of your business too. And by demonstrating the value in mitigating any risks, you can gain support and momentum for broader DevOps adoption. And DevOps at this core is a commitment to continuous improvement So keep that in mind and make time for assessing your processes in each sprint.
That brings us to time. I've talked a little bit more Then I was expecting two, if you'd like to stay on and ask any questions, I will do so.
But for more real world practice advice, feel free to reach out to me or reach out to any of the team at Giersa. And of course there's plenty more insights into the report.
From the gearset website. So if you had to get gearset dot com in the resources section, you can download the state of sales, which DevOps twenty twenty three report. And we'll scan the QR code now. The slides will be sent in a follow-up on a recording as well if you don't have time to catch it.
So I hope you've enjoyed and I will catch you all again soon. It
