In this session, we’ll discuss methods to manage configuration changes, sandboxes, testing, deployment, and documentation.
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0:00
(upbeat music)
0:02
- Hello everyone and welcome to you
0:26
another Salesforce Band linked in live.
0:28
So my name is Dana Darr and I'm the events
0:31
content producer at Salesforce Ben.
0:33
And I'm really excited to be your host for today's event
0:36
where we're gonna show you all of you Salesforce admins
0:39
out there how to stream your line,
0:41
your DevOps processes all without writing code.
0:45
So while we wait for everyone to join,
0:47
let us know where you're logging in from today.
0:49
We always love to see what the global audience
0:51
we have attending.
0:53
So many Salesforce admins face challenges
0:55
when it comes to managing a comprehensive DevOps process,
0:59
whether it's limited time, resources or expertise.
1:03
We understand the struggle.
1:04
So that's why we're here today to equip you
1:06
with the skills and knowledge that you need
1:08
to succeed in your career by implementing
1:10
an efficient change management process.
1:13
So I'm thrilled to introduce to you Gina Marquez
1:16
and Matthew Kennedy from Own Company
1:19
who are here with us today from their
1:21
Snazzy New Studio to share their insights
1:24
on how to simplify and optimize your DevOps processes.
1:28
Gina, would you like to introduce yourself?
1:30
- Sure, I'm Gina Marquez.
1:32
I'm the director of enterprise applications here at Own.
1:35
I've been at Own for six years now
1:37
and I was the first admin here.
1:40
I've been in the ecosystem 10 plus years,
1:42
Salesforce MVP, user group leader
1:45
with my friend Matt Kennedy who is joining me today.
1:48
- Yeah, Gina, happy to be here today.
1:50
So my name is Matt Kennedy,
1:51
principal technical evangelist here at Own.
1:54
Like Gina, I've been in the Salesforce ecosystem
1:56
10 plus years.
1:57
Been at Own just a little over seven years
2:00
initially as a solution engineer
2:01
but then transitioned to working with partners today.
2:04
So happy to be on this webinar we've talked about.
2:06
- Thank you for joining.
2:08
- Great, thank you.
2:09
So before we get started, just a bit of housekeeping.
2:12
So as this is a webinar, all lines are muted.
2:15
But don't worry, we'll be having a Q&A at the end
2:17
for you to ask Gina and Matthew
2:19
and you burning questions you may have.
2:21
So feel free to submit the questions
2:23
in the comments throughout the webinar.
2:25
The webinar will also be recorded
2:27
and will be available on ourselves
2:28
whilst Ben LinkedIn and YouTube channel
2:30
just in case you need to drop off
2:32
or would like to share it with your colleagues.
2:34
Something I just wanted to mention is
2:36
that you also want to stand a lookout
2:37
for a link in the chat to a raffle
2:40
where you will have the chance to win a Sonos Bluetooth speaker
2:44
which is worth 150 pounds.
2:46
So exciting stuff, look out for that.
2:48
We'll all hand it over to you, Gina and Matthew
2:51
to take us through the presentation
2:52
and I'll see you at the end for the Q&A.
2:54
- Awesome, thank you.
2:55
- Great.
2:57
So I think when we talk about this, Gina,
2:59
we really have a lot to cover today.
3:01
So let's just jump right in.
3:03
I think when you look at, it'd be great for you
3:05
to take us through your change management process,
3:09
gathering information, organizing, prioritizing,
3:14
through all the challenges with data and testing.
3:17
So before we celebrate the success of this process,
3:21
let's go step by step to understand
3:22
how to tackle this challenge.
3:25
- Yeah, so I wanted to do this
3:26
'cause whether you're in a new job
3:28
or you've transferred into the Salesforce opportunity
3:32
at your existing company
3:33
or just looking for a new way to track your work,
3:37
I started at own six years ago
3:39
with a 34 item backlog.
3:41
Things like replace application X,
3:44
move to lightning, automate lead processes,
3:48
implement a Netzween integration.
3:49
It was extremely overwhelming.
3:52
And so have you ever felt overwhelmed
3:55
with just there's so much work to do
3:57
and you just don't know where to begin?
4:00
- I think, you know,
4:01
that's interrupt you there,
4:02
but I remember when you started it.
4:04
We never had an admin before.
4:06
We were kind of doing a little admin by committee.
4:08
So we did have a pretty big backlog
4:11
and it was great to see you come in
4:12
and kind of take hold of that.
4:14
- But with that was a laundry list of items, right?
4:17
So being an admin of one,
4:19
I wanted to talk today about how to organize your work,
4:22
how to structure the changes you'll be making.
4:25
But before we begin,
4:26
it's really important to talk about the importance
4:28
of protecting your Salesforce org.
4:32
- No, absolutely.
4:33
I think when, you know, it's just a great point.
4:36
Anytime, you know,
4:37
you're undertaking a major digital transformation project,
4:41
you should really first establish, you know,
4:43
a clear data protection strategy.
4:46
You know, most Salesforce users think
4:47
that the SAS provider is responsible for data protection,
4:51
but as you can see on the slide,
4:52
it really is a shared responsibility model.
4:54
When you think about a SAS provider,
4:56
they're providing the infrastructure,
4:58
the uptime, the availability of their platform.
5:01
And as a user of that platform,
5:02
you always have access to your data as it exists right now.
5:06
But think about all the changes that occur on a daily basis.
5:09
You think about, you know, whether it's just end users
5:11
making changes, if it's admins developers deploying code,
5:15
if it's admins running large integrations,
5:18
you think about all the ETL tools
5:19
and all the data that changes on a daily basis.
5:22
What own provides is an automated daily backup
5:25
of all the data, the metadata, the files, the attachments.
5:28
So you can see what's changed from day to day
5:30
or week to week or month to month.
5:33
Oftentimes, you know, somebody runs some type of integration.
5:36
It doesn't realize there's an issue to a day later.
5:39
You'll be able to compare and identify exactly what changed.
5:42
So with data protection addressed,
5:44
you know, how can we now safely launch
5:47
a change management process?
5:49
- Yeah, so let's review what change management is, right?
5:51
It's how we manage all the changes
5:53
that are being requested of us.
5:56
How do we gain business alignment or business approval?
5:59
Especially if you're working in cross-functional projects,
6:03
cross-functional teams,
6:05
you wanna make sure you have alignment, right?
6:07
And then most importantly, prioritization.
6:09
What do we work on first, right?
6:10
Me being an admin of one in the beginning,
6:14
you know, I can only accomplish so many things at one time.
6:18
So you'll need to complete some impact analysis
6:20
of the work that's being requested of you.
6:23
And at OWN here, we love everyone to innovate.
6:27
If there's things in our applications
6:28
that can help people do their jobs better,
6:30
we welcome those suggestions and every admin should,
6:34
as it shows your colleagues that you're a trusted advisor.
6:37
- I think, you know, admin of one,
6:39
I think if you use an army of one,
6:41
we did have a lot going on.
6:43
So it's interesting, you know,
6:46
as you define that change management process,
6:50
now it's time to take a stock of where you are today
6:52
when you're looking through things.
6:53
First thing is documenting what's being done
6:56
and how it's getting done.
6:57
Specifically, if you're new to a job or a process
7:01
and you have a lot of information to gather,
7:03
Gina, what would you do first?
7:05
- So, I mean, first thing that I did when I started
7:08
was interviewing different people
7:10
in different parts of the organization,
7:12
how they work, what they actually do,
7:15
and then how they use Salesforce.
7:17
There's this concept of SABLA,
7:19
which is Salesforce Administration by walking around.
7:23
And gathering of information should be never ending.
7:26
You constantly wanna learn what your business is doing.
7:29
I tell everyone that I'm mentoring
7:31
to be a really good admin,
7:33
you should know what the business is doing.
7:36
That's where your value is.
7:38
The technology is kind of the easy part, right?
7:40
You have a community of people behind you,
7:43
you have the trailhead platform.
7:45
So the tech could be taught,
7:47
but the business is a little bit difficult.
7:50
- I think that SABLA concept is interesting.
7:53
And I do see you walking around a lot,
7:55
but I think I see a lot more people walking to you.
7:58
So sometimes maybe it's SABLA sitting around
8:01
and everything's--
8:03
- Sometimes they find me.
8:04
I think it's new hire orientation.
8:06
They just sort of picture up and say, go see her.
8:09
At this point, you're just gathering your workload, right?
8:13
You wanna start some type of backlog,
8:16
or define a backlog if they hand one to you, right?
8:19
And you wanna put some effort into analyzing
8:22
like how much work it's gonna take
8:24
to actually do those things
8:25
and put some type of priority around it.
8:28
- Excellent.
8:31
So, backlog, right?
8:34
I agree, it's the form moving forward
8:36
with any new initiatives.
8:37
It's really important to look at all those open requests.
8:41
Azure gathering information, you need to optimize,
8:45
you need to figure out what tools are available
8:48
and what you need to track and report on
8:53
as you're going through all that work.
8:55
Should you build something in Salesforce
8:58
for tracking or use a free tool, purchase some tool?
9:01
Gino, when you take us through like your day to day,
9:04
how do you consume work today?
9:06
- So starting on, I quickly built out the case record type
9:11
for an intake process.
9:13
So I was getting all kinds of requests
9:15
along with having this backlog of work.
9:17
And I classified that, right?
9:19
The tasks, right?
9:20
A user needs help with something versus,
9:23
here's a big project like ImplementNet Suite.
9:25
This helped to keep everything in one place for me.
9:29
It enabled me to prioritize things very simply.
9:32
And now we have three teams and almost 20 people.
9:36
So now we've moved to more, you know, formalized processes,
9:40
formalized tools, purchased tools.
9:43
But we still use those support cases today
9:45
for those user tasks.
9:47
So the point here is you need to start somewhere.
9:50
If you have nothing yet in place,
9:52
don't get hung up on the tools.
9:55
But you do wanna start somewhere.
9:56
- So three teams, 20 people,
9:59
you must just be sitting back and relaxing today, right?
10:01
- No, no, it doesn't happen here at all, unfortunately.
10:05
In those beginning days, we formed a review board.
10:09
We had the key stakeholders in the business
10:11
who would review all the project-related work.
10:15
And together we would prioritize those items
10:18
and the business would approve any new requests that came in.
10:21
Again, going back to any user could ask for something.
10:25
And this was critical for alignment
10:28
and making sure that I was working on the right things
10:30
at the right time for our business.
10:33
One takeaway here is every year we sat down
10:36
and did like a two-day kind of kick-off review.
10:40
What we were doing, how we were doing it,
10:42
how we were reporting.
10:43
And we actually started changing our processes
10:46
to reflect changes in the business.
10:48
So you have to evolve just like the business evolves, right?
10:51
And you must be able to report at least what you're doing,
10:55
how long it's taking, what's getting done
10:57
and the level of effort that it takes.
11:01
- Okay, so what you're saying is that
11:04
an intake process should include method
11:07
for work to get requested.
11:09
Don't forget those maintenance items, right?
11:11
There's like three releases a year on Salesforce.
11:14
There's constantly package upgrades
11:16
from some of the partner packages you're utilizing.
11:20
Do a high-level impact analysis, right?
11:22
You wanna be able to make sure
11:23
that you're meeting the cadence,
11:25
to review the work and prioritize those items
11:28
every two weeks, once a month.
11:29
I don't know, what is your current spring process?
11:31
- We do everything two weeks.
11:32
We always have, yeah. - Okay, important.
11:35
And then you wanna sign off on what was requested.
11:37
You wanna make sure that what you're getting done
11:40
and it should not be a requirements gathering meeting, right?
11:44
You really wanna make sure you're being productive.
11:47
As you're evaluating these requests,
11:50
what do you recommend to really set your priorities?
11:53
- So for prioritization,
11:56
you do have to do some assessment of effort, right?
11:59
You have to do some impact analysis
12:01
and this really should be done
12:03
before you meet with your business.
12:05
And that will help you to discuss prioritization.
12:09
Looking at the chart, you see the work
12:11
should be balanced between quick wins and major projects,
12:15
some fill-in, some maybes,
12:17
quick wins really for me should be at the top.
12:19
Their high impact, low effort,
12:23
and then kind of mixing everything in the rest, right?
12:27
When you have projects, you might have deadlines,
12:28
so that might take a little bit more priority as well.
12:32
But the important thing is to get your leadership
12:34
to buy into whatever type of prioritization method
12:37
you are using.
12:38
And at this point now, we have all the work collected,
12:41
we have the work prioritized, so we're ready to go.
12:46
- I think it's so easy to spend lots of time
12:49
right on those fill-ins.
12:50
Sometimes you can just get bogged down,
12:52
you think you're being productive, you're being busy,
12:54
but you're really making an impact.
12:55
So that's important to really prioritize.
12:58
So let's think about it.
13:01
You've got this intake process,
13:03
you decided what should be getting done first.
13:06
And with that completed,
13:09
when you think of the method to get started,
13:14
what do we do next?
13:15
You got your list, go ahead and run.
13:18
- So people hear the word agile,
13:20
and it's like to agile or not agile.
13:22
The point here is like you don't have to have
13:26
a formal sprint scrum process,
13:29
but you can commit to do work in two or one week sprints.
13:33
And this is your call based on your business
13:36
or your business review meeting, right?
13:38
But the earlier you adopt some type of a process,
13:41
the better.
13:42
Here at own, that's exactly what we did.
13:44
Once we had the work prioritized,
13:45
we would work on those items
13:47
till the next business meeting.
13:49
Some things would get finished,
13:51
some things were bigger projects.
13:53
So we would just provide an update on those projects.
13:55
And we'd also review what new things came in
13:58
in that two week period.
14:00
Remember, you can manage with cases
14:01
and drive your business review meeting
14:03
with a really great report or dashboard.
14:06
- I think the interesting thing that I saw
14:08
is as you like evolved and developed in this role
14:11
is that by setting those priorities
14:14
and agreeing to the business review,
14:16
then you could say no to some of those requests
14:18
that would just pop up. - That's not my vocabulary,
14:20
by the way. (laughing)
14:22
- I've heard no a lot.
14:23
And in a lot of requests that I've put in.
14:26
But I think you know, you can make a great point
14:28
by getting the business to sign off
14:30
on what has to get done and when,
14:33
it makes it easier to really prioritize
14:34
and kind of put off things that may be of that lower value.
14:38
All right, so we're about halfway through this webinar.
14:41
And now we can actually talk about getting the work done, right?
14:44
You've sorted through everything,
14:45
you've prioritized, you're ready to go.
14:47
Most things in Salesforce can be done in clicks, right?
14:51
The Flow Designer has come a long way
14:53
since when you started back here in 2018.
14:55
I think it was probably classic back then, right?
14:58
- It was classic and not the Flow Designer it is today.
15:01
- Not even close. (laughing)
15:03
So today we're focusing on the clicks portion
15:05
of administration and using native tools available to you now.
15:08
So tell us what you would do.
15:10
- Yeah, nothing I'm gonna review today is code related,
15:13
using Apex, you know, I wanna show you native tools.
15:16
But first, let's talk about data protection
15:18
and the importance of protecting the work that you're doing.
15:21
- Yeah, I mean, as we mentioned earlier, right?
15:25
Protecting your data is your responsibility.
15:27
Every SaaS vendor, you know, protects their platform,
15:31
but they put the responsibility of data protection,
15:34
you know, on the users.
15:35
And this is true not just for Salesforce,
15:37
but ServiceNow, Microsoft Dynamics,
15:39
really every other SaaS vendor out there.
15:42
And the burden of shared responsibility goes beyond
15:45
ensuring business continuity when the data is lost
15:48
or corrupted.
15:49
It also extends to securing it against unauthorized access
15:53
and ensuring compliance with regulations
15:55
and governance policies.
15:57
- Yeah, it's really important to protect your data.
16:00
You don't wanna close a business disruption.
16:02
And these limitations can also stifle innovation, right?
16:07
As an example, 90% of the Salesforce developers
16:11
report that they don't refresh their sandboxes frequently.
16:15
It takes time and there's effort required.
16:18
And so they lose out on the ability
16:19
to have fresh, accurate data for testing.
16:22
Data that could help identify bugs
16:25
before they get to production.
16:27
Data could also help reduce the 50% of the time
16:31
they spend fixing code and redirecting that towards building
16:35
and innovating and knocking off that backlog.
16:39
- Yeah, no, I think, and one of the challenges
16:42
I know that we wrestle with here all the time
16:43
is sandbox seating, right?
16:44
You think about manual sandbox seating, right?
16:48
You're wasting a lot of time with CSVs,
16:50
with Excel, VLOOK, up data loader, right?
16:54
And you're just trying to get like a representation
16:57
of your data in a sandbox, but it's a very manual process
17:00
with a lot of steps involved.
17:02
We also think production backups are critical,
17:05
but what about all those sandboxes?
17:07
I mean, they really should be protected as well.
17:09
Think about accidental refresh of a sandbox.
17:12
If you have a project that's in flight,
17:13
you could potentially lose some of the work
17:15
that's being done in there.
17:17
So the other thing is, you know,
17:18
when you look at deployments,
17:20
we think it's really important that backups are done
17:24
before and after deployments, right?
17:26
You wanna be able to do those comparisons
17:27
to see what's changed.
17:29
So our compariutility and own recover
17:31
allows for both the metadata and the data
17:34
to be identified between one day, one week, one month,
17:37
whatever you're looking at.
17:38
And you know, lots of those applications store configuration
17:42
and data objects.
17:43
Think of something like CPQ.
17:45
- Right. - You're doing products,
17:47
- Price and rules. - Price book entries, right?
17:50
Those get configured and set up in a sandbox environment
17:54
and then get deployed to production.
17:55
Well, if something goes wrong,
17:56
how do you identify what's been changed
17:58
as part of that release?
18:00
- Yeah, I can say sandbox seating is one of the top products
18:03
that we use here.
18:04
We use all of our products,
18:06
but seating is by far my favorite and most used.
18:11
- Awesome. All right.
18:12
So the other critical factor I think
18:14
when you think about sandbox seating is, you know,
18:17
our tool will move production data down
18:20
to a sandbox environment.
18:21
And I think any customer you talk to,
18:24
the first thing they say is,
18:25
well, whoa, whoa, whoa, be careful there.
18:27
We got a lot of sensitive information.
18:29
So there's also the ability to anonymize.
18:31
You want to be able to mask information
18:32
that's going from that production environment
18:34
down to the sandbox.
18:35
Think of fields like name, address, email, phone number,
18:38
credit card data, so security information,
18:41
all highly sensitive information.
18:43
You want to make sure that whatever you're doing
18:45
when you're populating those sandbox
18:46
is going to mask that information.
18:48
So when we think about, you know,
18:51
going through these sandbox types,
18:54
help me, help me understand how all these work.
18:57
There's a lot here.
18:58
So we always start with sandboxes, right?
19:00
You're never building in production.
19:03
So I wanted to just take a minute to explain the sandboxes.
19:08
First on the list here on this slide
19:10
is the developer sandbox.
19:12
And it's intended for development and testing
19:14
in its own environment, right?
19:16
It includes a copy of all of your metadata,
19:19
the configuration.
19:20
It does come free.
19:22
You can refresh it every day.
19:24
It holds about 200 megabyte of data and files.
19:27
And this is really where you should start.
19:30
Next is developer pro.
19:32
Now this is a paid solution.
19:34
It's intended for development and testing as well
19:37
in an isolated environment,
19:38
but it can just hold a larger data set.
19:41
So you can still refresh it every day,
19:43
but it holds one gig of data,
19:45
yeah, one gig of data and one gig of files.
19:47
You can do, you know, more development there,
19:50
more quality assurance testing, integration testing,
19:53
et cetera.
19:54
Yeah, now you have to, you correct me if I'm wrong,
19:58
but when you started six years ago,
20:00
were you doing work in sandbox or is it right in production?
20:03
- Always in sandbox, always in sandbox.
20:05
- All right, I'm not sure I'll remember it quite that way,
20:08
but I'm-- - Just don't ask the 19
20:09
of the other people that are from the team.
20:12
(laughs)
20:13
- All right, well, and I think that's true of a lot of companies.
20:15
Right, a lot of companies today have developer,
20:18
developer pro sandboxes,
20:19
but they may not be using them
20:21
because of that complicated manual seating process,
20:24
we talked about earlier.
20:26
You know, these sandboxes, when you spin 'em up,
20:29
great, I got a brand new dev,
20:30
I got a brand new dev pro,
20:32
it's got all the configuration data from my production org,
20:34
but it's empty.
20:36
- Right. - Now it's up to me
20:37
to put in some valuable information to test.
20:40
And if I'm doing these two weeks sprints,
20:42
I gotta be doing that every two weeks.
20:44
That's where I think companies sometimes wrestle
20:46
with just keeping those sandboxes up to date.
20:48
- Exactly.
20:50
Partial sandbox, depending on your edition, is free, right?
20:54
But it's not anonymized.
20:55
So you do have to go in and mask some of that data
20:58
that's in there.
20:59
It's intended to be used as a testing environment.
21:02
It includes a copy of your, all of your orgs configuration.
21:06
However, it only gives you a sample of your production data.
21:10
And you can identify that by using templates.
21:13
You could use it for quality assurance testing,
21:16
user acceptance testing, integration testing,
21:18
and you can also do some training in there.
21:21
That could be refreshed every five days.
21:23
And it holds about five gig of data
21:25
and all of your files from your production environment.
21:29
And then we move to full sandbox,
21:31
which again is a paid solution.
21:34
It's intended to be used for testing as well.
21:37
But full sandbox to support more performance testing,
21:41
load testing and staging.
21:44
It's a total replica of your production org,
21:46
all the data, all the metadata,
21:48
files, attachments, everything.
21:51
But you can only refresh it every 29 days.
21:53
So if you're working in two weeks friends,
21:55
that might be a little bit of a challenge.
21:57
But I just also wanna know here on Sandboxes,
22:01
there's lots of enhancements coming and the recent releases.
22:04
There's things like Quick Clone, Quick Create.
22:07
There's some scale testing features
22:09
and there's more to come.
22:10
So please watch your release notes
22:12
because there's always some things happening here
22:15
in the sandbox world, which is nice to see.
22:17
- I see one of those was release notes.
22:19
You get so excited, you have to go through all 300 pages.
22:22
(laughing)
22:23
- Luckily they give us the hybrid versions.
22:25
(laughing)
22:27
- All right, so that's a lot of information.
22:29
Thanks for clarifying all those different sandbox types
22:32
that are available.
22:33
Can you walk us through how you establish a structure
22:38
for admins to isolate their work
22:41
until they're ready to merge into a team testing environment?
22:45
- Right, so using the native structure,
22:46
this is kind of what it would look like.
22:48
You would eliminate that full sandbox
22:50
if you don't have one.
22:52
Admin Sandboxes, which are the developer sandbox,
22:55
would be where each admin has an environment.
22:58
So I would have a sandbox, you would have a sandbox.
23:02
Everybody gets a car.
23:03
Once everything's tested, those changes get moved
23:07
into your partial sandbox.
23:09
And you can have users testing there,
23:10
you can do some load testing integration testing,
23:13
you could document your changes for training.
23:16
Load testing is really not ideal in partial,
23:18
'cause it is only a subset of your data,
23:21
but it's better than nothing, right?
23:24
And as admins, sometimes you hear these terms
23:26
like promote, deploy, change set,
23:28
there's lots of things to move changes
23:30
to sandbox to sandbox.
23:31
And there's lots of tools that allow you to do this.
23:34
Using code and repository and branches,
23:37
more formal DevOps processes.
23:39
But right now we're just focused on just moving,
23:44
moving that data from sandbox to sandbox.
23:45
- Yeah, I mean, we could do another two or three webinars
23:50
on all the DevOps processes, those tools.
23:52
There's a lot of third party apps that are available, right?
23:54
That it can assist with this, both free and paid.
23:57
And you can research things like Salesforce DevOps Center.
24:01
It's a good next step.
24:03
Obviously everybody in Salesforce says go to Trailhead.
24:06
Start with there, if you're not sure,
24:09
see what's available, actually learn the process.
24:11
I think when somebody looks at this slide,
24:14
they may go, wow, that's a lot.
24:16
And you're not saying that you have to do all of this today.
24:19
You can start with a single admin
24:21
in a single developer sandbox,
24:23
and then promote the production.
24:24
And you can add in these layers as the team grows.
24:27
- Exactly.
24:29
Salesforce, by the way, is introducing CodeBuilder, right?
24:32
Which is now in an IDE environment.
24:35
It's now browser based, where Visual Studio
24:38
is a tool that gets installed locally.
24:40
It's the newest tool, it'll be a managed package,
24:43
another managed package we gotta upgrade
24:45
in your production environment.
24:47
And once you enable it, you can then connect any sandbox to it.
24:51
And we're focusing here just on basic and simple.
24:56
Full teams would have multiple developers and admins,
24:59
QA testers, UAT happening, enablement.
25:03
You could have a formal Scrum team, ScrumMaster,
25:07
release managers.
25:08
I'm just really staying focused here
25:10
on getting kind of back to the basics.
25:12
Just the simple thing, right?
25:14
- Yeah, and I think the key point is,
25:16
as you're going through all these different promotions,
25:20
there is a lot of moving parts.
25:22
So this kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier,
25:24
and only cover being in place,
25:26
then not just back up to production environment,
25:28
but all these sandboxes as you're moving through stages
25:31
of a project.
25:32
It's important to have those daily snapshots in time.
25:35
- Yeah, so let's summarize here.
25:39
If you're following some sort of print process,
25:41
which I hope you are,
25:42
once you're deployed to production,
25:44
your partial and your developer sandboxes
25:46
can be refreshed, receded and anonymized
25:49
for the next round of changes, right?
25:52
You really wanna focus on making sure
25:55
your production environment is as close
25:57
to your sandbox environments as possible
25:59
as far as the metadata is concerned.
26:01
And you should also have a refresh process in place,
26:04
some kind of refresh schedule, right?
26:06
Document how you're gonna refresh your sandboxes
26:09
and when you're gonna do that.
26:10
- Yeah, as we talked about earlier,
26:12
if it is a manual process, you're less apt to do it, right?
26:15
And you're gonna go with a month, two months.
26:17
I've heard some customers with full sandboxes
26:20
that haven't been refreshed in a year,
26:22
just because it is so cumbersome to get that done.
26:24
And I think when you look at like the own recovery utility
26:28
and getting those daily snapshots,
26:29
that's where the compare really comes in
26:31
because you can identify and isolate
26:34
what's being changed on a daily basis.
26:36
- Right, and you could have consultants working
26:38
in this sandbox structure, right?
26:41
And you really need to make sure you know
26:43
what changes they're making, right?
26:45
And making sure that your data is protected.
26:47
So I wanted to touch on testing, right?
26:52
It's really important to test with real-world data.
26:56
You know what you changed on the metadata side
26:59
and you know what to test.
27:01
But it's important if you develop a plan for testing.
27:04
You wanna make sure you're including positive
27:06
and negative outcomes.
27:08
If you're touching anything that touches an integration,
27:11
whether it's upstream, downstream,
27:13
you really wanna do testing with those integrations
27:16
to make sure that you're not breaking anything.
27:19
When you're rolling out changes,
27:20
you wanna make sure that your users know
27:22
how to use your new functionality that you're implementing.
27:26
- Yeah, I think, you know, testing is critical,
27:29
but also anytime you're doing any kind of new release, right?
27:33
You wanna get some of those users
27:34
into actually test out the application.
27:36
And we do that all the time.
27:38
We get the users set up in a sandbox environment.
27:41
They can add the lead, they can change information.
27:43
They can run an integration and actually see
27:45
how the data is gonna move.
27:47
And you know, getting those power users
27:49
in a sandbox environment is really important
27:51
before it goes to production, right?
27:53
Let's find those issues now
27:55
before we're actually releasing into our live environment.
27:58
- I also like to say, you suggested I made this change
28:01
so you have to help me test it now.
28:02
(laughing)
28:04
- Deal.
28:05
- You need to help them to document what they need to test.
28:08
They're not gonna know how you build something, but yes,
28:11
and users definitely should be engaged.
28:14
Another point I wanna make here on testing,
28:16
which often admins might miss, is monitoring, right?
28:21
Once you deploy a change, you wanna make sure
28:25
if you've deployed something that should be updating data,
28:28
that that data is getting updated the way you intended, right?
28:32
It's really great to create an exception report,
28:34
as an example, if you say this field can never be blank, right?
28:39
Create an exception report, right?
28:41
And subscribe to it.
28:42
If the record count is one, your criteria is not blank.
28:46
Boom, you'll get an alert saying,
28:48
"Hey, there's something here."
28:50
You might have missed something when you developed it.
28:52
It's really important to monitor for the success.
28:55
The last thing you wanna find out
28:56
is three months down the road, someone's like,
28:58
"Hey, there's a problem with our data."
29:01
And then you realize it's because you made a change, right?
29:04
You don't want to disrupt the business.
29:06
I'm constantly telling that to admins.
29:08
You don't want the business to come to you with a problem.
29:11
- I thought once you released your done,
29:12
you just move on to the next project, no?
29:14
- Exactly.
29:15
- All right, so let's celebrate.
29:19
You've just taken a stroke.
29:21
Yeah, you take a stroke a lot of things, right?
29:24
And as an admin, you do all this work,
29:27
but you really need to kind of track it, right?
29:29
You wanna look at reports, dashboards, show work,
29:32
that's waiting, that's being prioritized,
29:35
getting done, right?
29:38
What are you using to do that today?
29:39
- So you wanna make sure you celebrate your success, right?
29:42
And you wanna measure the process
29:44
before you implemented it and after.
29:47
You wanna document the changes that you made
29:49
to any process so you can show
29:51
what efficiencies have been added or gained, right?
29:54
You wanna capture the hours it takes
29:56
for you to work on those individual tasks
29:58
or those projects, right?
29:59
It helps show that the high effort projects
30:03
that were delivered and you can report that monthly,
30:06
quarterly, whatever the works for you or created dashboard,
30:10
but you wanna show what was done, what was added,
30:12
what's currently in the backlog by the priority.
30:15
And this all sets you up for your next review
30:18
beginning with the business,
30:19
so the process starts all over again.
30:21
This also helps to identify when you need help,
30:24
when I need to go to leadership and say,
30:27
you need to hire another admin,
30:28
'cause look at all this work and I can't get to it.
30:32
(dramatic music)
30:34
(upbeat music)