Part 2: Liberate Salesforce Delivery With DevOps

Reporting Analytics

Even if you’re not an engineering leader, you should love reports as much as they do. Especially in the era of COVID, metrics on performance reassure employers of the value brought by teams and individuals. To be frank, the world is getting smaller and resources are under the microscope like never before thanks to COVID, so now it’s more important than ever to measure the throughput of your organization’s efforts. Simply put, the out of the box reporting tools available from Salesforce aren’t enough in this day and age. The most effective companies require a comprehensive Salesforce delivery management solution for insight into planning, development and delivery. Such reporting can show how your teams work together while exposing wasted time so you can maximize how Salesforce works for you. 

At the end of the day, understanding long term trends is as important as understanding the current state. That’s why you need to track the full history of metrics you’re concerned about so you can anticipate future performance issues before they happen. Forward-thinking leaders focus on the four key DevOps metrics of Deployment Frequency, Lead Time, Change Fail Rate, and Time to Recover. But the best of the best take it one step further by analyzing the intricacies of how you plan, develop and deliver. 

Diving into the deep end of planning, you need to think about the progress of your current Sprints with metrics like Burn Up and how to improve predictability by looking at historic trends like velocity, % of work carried over from each sprint, Planned vs. Completed work, as well as the Distribution of Lead time. 

That said, planning is the foundation for agile organizations but development gets all the glory and it sometimes gets overanalyzed. Filter out the noise and look at how metadata changes over time in different projects. This helps you understand the code vs. config balance while also finding hotspots in your metadata that might deserve refactoring. 

Just like planning and development, it’s important to get metrics on the “last mile”, delivery. Deployments are responsible for a startling amount of lost sleep, grey hairs, and stress. To eliminate the stress that comes with deployments, begin by analyzing deployment trends so you can understand their average speed and frequency. Once you have this information you’re able to identify inefficiencies like excessive manual steps, high deployment complexity, and recurring failures that interfere with a smooth release process. 

Another powerful tool for understanding the development process are value stream maps. Value stream maps (VSM) are a cutting edge reporting technique that summarizes the path work takes from start to finish. VSMs expose metrics on time and quality at every stage, helping you find the areas that need the most attention. This kind of data-driven approach is the key to going from good to great. 

In short, you’re not going to become a world class Salesforce organization overnight. It’s tough and tedious, but if it were easy then everyone would be world class. Some things can be solved by changing processes while others can be solved by partnering with vendors. You’ll suffer growing pains along the way, you’ll get frustrated and you’ll battle with finance to find the money to pay for some products, but it’ll be all worth it at the end when you have a real advantage over your competitors.