Beating cancer one development cycle at a time

KWF is a non-profit organization based in the Netherlands that has made it their mission to actively fight cancer. They work with tireless commitment to defeat cancer. They have successfully raised funds to support and guide cancer research.

KWF's mission is to ensure that cancer research receives sufficient financial support to find a cure for this devastating disease. As a national organization, they are responsible for funding and implementing various cancer-related initiatives throughout the Netherlands.

Situation

KWF quickly realized that they needed a reliable team to manage and improve their existing Salesforce environment in order to continue meeting their important goals. Using a partnership between Outbirds, another Salesforce partner, and CaseNine, KWF formed a top Salesforce team.

This team assumed responsibility for managing KWF's Salesforce environment, including the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP), designed specifically for nonprofit organizations.

Below are some specifics:

• Dedicated management: The team is fully dedicated to managing KWF's Salesforce environment, ensuring the optimal operation and efficiency of the system.
• Nonprofit Sector Expertise: With extensive experience in the nonprofit sector, the team understands KWF's unique needs and challenges and can provide customized solutions.

Proactive improvements: In addition to managing the standard Salesforce environment, the team is constantly identifying and implementing improvements within the NPSP to further strengthen KWF's operational effectiveness.

• Support and training: The team provides KWF with ongoing support and training so that employees can take full advantage of the Salesforce environment and the NPSP.

With a well-maintained and optimized Salesforce application, KWF ensures that all their processes are up-to-date and organized.

Impact

The development of new features required considerable time and commitment from KWF. Multiple developers were configuring, coding and modifying sandboxes, leading to a lack of documentation and reviews of code changes. In addition, the lack of IT staff caused KWF to experience difficulties in reviewing existing functionality for developers.

Another challenge was that developers were often preoccupied with building something new, neglecting or even breaking other aspects. This resulted in outdated systems and frequent failure of changes in the production environment, which prevented employees from working and required frequent hotfixes. Sometimes even multiple hotfixes had to be implemented per day.

One of the main functions of the new team is troubleshooting and resolving issues. They work closely with the organization to research new Salesforce features and keep existing functionality up-to-date.

Result

Team collaboration has led to impressive improvements in both Salesforce development and management at KWF. With the adoption of new tools and workflows, the organization is now enjoying the following benefits:

• The implementation of TeamCity provides better validations.
• A small team of two administrators bundles work into Sandboxes, streamlining and simplifying administrative procedures.
• There is an established continuous release plan, with updates being implemented every two weeks. With the release plan scheduled for the following Monday, the team can hotfixes, run tests and implement the updates over the weekend with as part of the next release.
• The team uses unified solutions that simplify, automate and streamline business processes. This is all done from one central source of truth.
• A major result of these improvements is a significant reduction in production downtime. This means that hotfixes or rollbacks are now required only once or twice a year.

Outcome

The updated Salesforce implementation eliminated code management and version control issues. Some of the new processes implemented brought the following benefits:

• Developers can now take advantage of the power of team-based development at the enterprise level using Salesforce DX. This ensures that developers cannot accidentally overwrite each other's work in sandboxes.
• By establishing file management procedures (Single Source of Truth - SSOT), problems have been minimized. Updates are now handled effectively and without duplication of effort.
• Implementing automated checks and balances at the basic Dev and Admin change level ensures that errors are detected pre-emptively, reducing the likelihood of errors. This has resulted in significant savings in manual work and increased overall efficiency.

With the implementation of these improved processes, timelines for the development of new features have been shortened and incidents in production environments have been greatly reduced. Developers now collaborate on a single unified solution, reducing errors due to different development approaches and making collaboration easier.

With the move to a more streamlined, robust and flexible Salesforce development and management environment, KWF can now enjoy better business continuity and operational efficiency. As a result, the organization is better positioned than ever to continue its mission to fight cancer.

These improvements have resulted in improved workflow, higher quality code and better change management. KWF can now develop new features faster and more efficiently, while ensuring system stability and reliability.

Check out KWF's mission against cancer for life

Go to kwf.nl