Finding a First Safe Step in your Salesforce DevOps Transformation

Measure Current Performance

As you prepare to transform your software delivery process, it’s paramount that you understand and plan for what it is you want to transform. The State of DevOps Report lays out  four key metrics for benchmarking: lead time, deployment frequency, change fail rate, and time to restore. Before you start implementing change, knowing where you stand is an important first step. Copado offers a brief Salesforce DevOps Assessment tool to help you assess how you compare with other organizations.  Benchmarking current performance will make it easier to measure performance improvements and help identify short-, mid-, and long-term strategies for improving these metrics.

Share the Vision

Once you have an idea or vision, make sure to share it with your team. There’s no need to prepare a PowerPoint or draft a resource allocation proposal, but don’t keep it a secret that you believe your organization could benefit from iDevOps methodologies. It will help get your team excited and build support for future efforts. 

Beyond your teammates, talk with stakeholders who will benefit from improving  the delivery process. Business stakeholders often serve as key accomplices for building momentum within the broader business. They’ll also have insights into which pain points are strongest outside of your delivery apparatus, helping you identify quick wins.

Make it Real

Identify a process improvement you can implement quickly, and use it to build momentum. Start with something achievable that’ll get you team excited. Some possibilities include:

• Set up a git repository and retrieve metadata on a weekly basis. This will quickly help you build insights into how (and how much) your org is changing over time. 
• Move a commonly changed business requirement into a custom setting that lets you enable or disable a feature. This will help cut down on deployment time. 
• Update a TestSetup method to cut down on testing time.

Quick changes like these will help give your team a small taste of how DevOps can improve their workflows, helping you build buy-in and increase future adoption.

Make it a Habit

It doesn’t take much to start building excitement, but it also doesn’t take much for other priorities to distract from your fledgling DevOps transformation. Block time each week to plan, assess progress, and find ways to build your Salesforce org’s resiliency, safety, and speed. Continue to share your thoughts and progress with your colleagues. If you do sprint retrospectives as a team, consider adding questions about continuous improvement to the agenda.

No matter where you are in your DevOps transformation journey, continuous improvement and adaptation are essential ingredients for the long term viability of any modern organization. Normalizing a culture of process improvement doesn’t happen overnight, but fighting “imposter syndrome” and remembering that even the most impressive organizations start with these same basic steps will help keep you motivated. Your improvement ideas are the seeds for great results down the road for yourself and your team. So take that first safe step today!