Salesforce is the world’s leading CRM platform for businesses of all sizes. Some 150,000 enterprises across the globe rely on Salesforce, and Savant has a dedicated practice that specialises in permanent, interim and retained recruitment in this space. Savant is your partner to access the right professionals that will define, accelerate and maximise the value of your Salesforce capability. Our practice combines a pool of known specialists with the expertise of one of the world's leading, influential Salesforce consulting partners to offer our customers a digital, competitive edge in the marketplace. To make it easy for our clients, Savant applies a simple approach with a strong focus on Quality, Value and Speed. That’s why we are eager to bring together the Salesforce community and foster closer relationships in what is an ever-changing ecosystem.

At the first of these events, in central London, attendees heard from Savant and representatives from three organisations sharing their expertise in ways to get the best out of Salesforce: Provar: Richard Clark, Chief Strategy Officer, and Will Hughes, Senior Solution Engineer Elements.cloud: Xavery Lisinski, VP of Product Management Flosum: Erkan Erdogan, Sales Director Savant: Peter Kyriacou, Head of Salesforce Practice at Savant presents the highlights of an engaging and constructive session.

How Automated Testing Will Benefit Your Organisation - Provar

How many companies test their Salesforce releases before putting them into production? Not enough, if the show of hands at the event when asked this question by Richard is an indicator. As he said: “You think, ‘It’s Salesforce, of course it’s going to work’. I’m here to convince you otherwise, but not to frighten you too much.” There are, six good reasons why you should get releases: i) Compliance: You may be in a regulated industry, or have GDPR concerns. ii) Risk avoidance: This will vary between businesses – if you are an e- commerce brand, for instance, you do not want to launch a new product online priced at one cent instead of $100. iii) User and story acceptance: Automated testing is a huge time-saver in this respect. iv) Issue verification: If you automate your testing, once you fix an issue it will not be reintroduced in future .v) Performance/UX: Automating your testing means you can measure the performance of your tests and ensure they are making a difference. vi) Change/impact reporting: By making your changes in a sandbox, you can get feedback and insight as soon as possible. It is never too early to start automated testing of your releases.

Why? Because the cost of fixing defects is thirty times higher if you wait until they are in production, rather than addressing them during the design stage. Automated testing also eliminates regression debt, which can otherwise impact on your budget as successive releases are introduced.

Ultimately, businesses should be spending their time on their customisations, not on fixing their tests. Provar customers report a 90 per cent improvement in their production and test maintenance; one company went from a whole team needing three months to carry out testing to one person being able to do it in a week. Provar has recently launched Provar Infinity, an integrated cloud-first suite that manages continuous quality throughout the development cycle. Will gave a demonstration of Provar’s testing tools in action; as he said, automatically generated reports enable testers to pass the information on to developers while saying: “I can tell you exactly what’s going wrong, so you can immediately fix it,” – which represents a smoother and more effective feedback loop.

Why You Need Change Intelligence - Elements.cloud

Xavery offered several general principles and best practices in organisation management. As he said, the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) is the latest wave of technological revolution, but digital transformation remains an extremely challenging activity fraught with risk. This is evidenced by the following figures:

• 87.5% of digital transformations fail to meet their objectives.
• 26% show no sustainable change at all, meaning they can be defined as total failures.
• Of the $1.3trillion spent on digital transformation in 2018, $900billion was wasted.
• Of 16,000 such projects, just 0.5% - one in 200 – delivered the trifecta of expected benefits, expected budget and timeline. 

One of the central reasons behind these statistics is that too many issues, costs and risks are not discovered until a late stage in the development lifecycle. A notorious recent episode that illustrates this point is Birmingham City Council declaring itself bankrupt. There were many factors behind this, but one was the failed implementation of its ERP system. This was originally expected to cost £20million, but the actual final bill was £100million. The system was massively delayed, and even when it did go live it was not able to perform all the functions required. As Xavery put it: “Digital automation changes some key business processes – and if they go wrong, Hell can follow.” One way to avoid such a situation is to deploy change intelligence, which can be defined as the ability to capture knowledge about your business and its systems configuration, and an ability to apply that knowledge to decide how business change is to be executed most effectively.

Change intelligence is applied in five stages:

• Understand the current system and business configuration.
• Plan the jobs that need to be done – take your wish list and really understand what you are looking to accomplish.
• Execute a fit gap analysis. By analysing how the business operates now, and how it needs to function in future, you can identify which parts of the process need to be changed.
• Only now, at this point, should you design your solution. Assess the impact and risk of the changes you plan. This is arguably the most crucial stage of the whole process.

By following these principles, and taking time to investigate and truly understand the full implications of a digital transformation, you can make the right decisions. There are certain change intelligence capabilities you need to bring to your organisation:

• Configuration knowledge: Full oversight of how your Salesforce organisation and adjacent systems are architected.
• Operational knowledge: An understanding of how your business operates, and the relationships between your processes and systems.
• Impact assessment: It is vital that you have the ability to traverse both technical and operational dependencies.

This in turn may mean you need to invest in hiring the right skills for your enterprise. These may include:

• Business analysis, specifically a knowledge of UPN process diagramming, and fit-gap expertise.
• Architecture and system landscape design.
• Centre of Excellence, to establish best practice and consistency across the business.

The Advantages of Native Development – Flosum

Automation also plays a key role for Flosum, an end-to-end dev ops platform that was built on Salesforce to manage Salesforce. This brings several advantages to users; traditional dev ops are complicated enough, but the nature of Salesforce adds extra complexity. As far as possible, Flosum works to reduce that level of complication for its clients, helping to ensure faster and better releases. Indeed, the company claims it can secure and accelerate the entire development lifecycle.

The benefits of working with a provider that is fully native to Salesforce include:

• Applications can be deployed faster, which means both reduced bugs and increased uptime.
• More secure dev ops, which in turn means the highest standards of data compliance.
• Extra value to the business delivered by reduced time trouble-shooting and fixing errors.

Our sincere thanks go to attendees and all of our speakers for their contributions to an event that was packed with practical, relevant insights that could be taken away and applied to their Salesforce operations. Savant is here to help with all your permanent, interim and retained Salesforce recruitment requirements, so please get in touch to discuss your situation. And please look out for future events where we will bring together members of the Salesforce community. We look forward to seeing you there.

The benefits of working with a developer that is fully native to Salesforce include:

• Applications can be deployed faster, which means both reduced bugs and increased uptime.
• More secure dev ops, which in turn means the highest standards of data compliance.
• Extra value to the business delivered by reduced time trouble-shooting and fixing errors.

Our sincere thanks go to attendees and all of our speakers for their contributions to an event that was packed with practical, relevant insights that could be taken away and applied to their Salesforce operations. Savant is here to help with all your permanent, interim and retained Salesforce recruitment requirements, so please get in touch to discuss your situation. Please look out for future events where we will bring together members of the Salesforce community. We look forward to seeing you there.