Overview

The City and County of Denver implemented Salesforce 311, built on Salesforce Service Cloud Einstein, to streamline citizen services for over 650,000 residents. The solution enables citizens to report issues ranging from potholes to powerline repairs. 

However, managing these processes with traditional deployment tools like Change Sets posed challenges that hampered operational efficiency and DevOps maturity.

This case study highlights how the City and County of Denver transitioned to Flosum, achieving remarkable improvements in deployment time, efficiency, and environmental parity while reducing reliance on developer resources.

Challenges before Flosum

Before adopting Flosum, the team struggled with:

• Inefficient Deployment Processes: Reliance on Salesforce Change Sets created bottlenecks with manual dependency identification, conflict resolution, and rollback tasks, taking up valuable developer time.
• Limited DevOps Maturity: The team’s processes were at the starting stage of the DevOps maturity model, limiting scalability and agility.
• High Resource Dependence: Deployments often required a release manager and a developer working together for hours, diverting resources from core development tasks.
• System Conflicts: Frequent conflicts between changes disrupted production environments and increased downtime.

On average, deployments took up to 8 hours per major update, often involving a release manager and a developer. This process frequently resulted in conflicts requiring manual resolution, leading to delays and inefficiencies.

"We were using another DevOps tool. It was pretty bad how much time we were spending. Doing some deployments because there are issues." Martha Milbrath, Technical Salesforce Program Manager at the City and County of Denver.

Implementation with Flosum

The City and County of Denver adopted Flosum as a DevOps solution to address these challenges. Key steps included:

1. Process Refinement: The team first optimized their internal CI/CD processes, transitioning from waterfall to agile sprints. Once their processes were mature, they identified Flosum as the ideal tool to integrate seamlessly with Azure DevOps.
2. Integration with Existing Tools: Flosum’s compatibility with Azure repositories allowed smooth integration, ensuring centralized control and enhanced visibility.
3. Training and Adoption: The release manager leveraged Flosum’s user-friendly interface to quickly adapt, eliminating the need for intensive developer involvement in deployment prep work.
4. Leveraging Flosum Features: The City and County of Denver’s DevOps teams particularly utilized certain features that gave them an edge compared to other DevOps tools. These features include
   
   1. Rollback Capabilities: Flosum offers rollback capabilities, which were crucial for the team to quickly revert changes if necessary, minimizing downtime and potential issues.
   2. Conflict Resolution: With Flosum, the team prevented code overwrites and false conflicts, ensuring smoother deployments.
   3. Versioning: There was no need to integrate with Git for version control. Flosum offers native version control built specifically for Salesforce, eliminating the need for specialized training or skills.
   4. Flexible Branching Strategy: Flosum provided a simpler, more efficient way to collaborate and deploy in Salesforce by enabling a feature-level branching strategy compared to org-level branches.
   5. Environment Management: Flosum’s back-syncing feature ensured that lower environments remained in sync, minimizing production issues and reducing backlog.

"Keeping our environments in parity is really valuable. Before Flosum, we weren’t back syncing at all. Now, with Flosum, we can ensure that changes are synchronized across lower environments, which minimizes issues in production." Martha Milbrath, Technical Salesforce Program Manager at the City and County of Denver

Business benefits

Adopting Flosum delivered significant benefits for Denver’s team:

• Accelerated Deployments: What previously required both a developer and a release manager now requires just one resource with a click of a button. Flosum has made deployment 70% faster.
• Improved DevOps Maturity: The team progressed from the starting stage to a building-and-refining stage in their DevOps maturity model, achieving greater operational agility.
• Increased Sprint Velocity: Sprint velocity improved by 40%, enabling the team to address backlog and production issues faster.
• Resource Efficiency: Tasks that previously required developers for prep work, often taking up to 8 hours, can now be managed by the release manager independently, freeing up expensive developer resources.
• Time Savings: Routine deployments - which once took anywhere between 8 hours to 2 days - are now completed in under 15 minutes, allowing the team to focus on innovation rather than repetitive tasks.

Before Flosum, we were spending way too much time deploying stuff rather than doing the work itself. The Flosum tool saved us a ton of time doing deployments. It just makes deployments a lot easier, that's all. Anybody who's familiar with Salesforce, which we all are, it makes it a lot easier. We have basically increased our sprint velocity by about 40% since we implemented Flosum." Gabriel Passarelli, Senior Salesforce Developer at City and County of Denver.

Conclusion/Summary

The City and County of Denver’s journey with Flosum illustrates how the right DevOps tool can transform deployment and release management. 

By automating repetitive tasks, reducing resource dependency, and improving environment parity, Flosum has empowered Denver’s team to achieve greater efficiency and agility. 

The result is faster service delivery for over 650,000 citizens and a DevOps framework ready for future scalability.

"Flosum’s intuitive interface and powerful automation have been a game-changer for our team, allowing us to deploy faster and more reliably than ever before," Jerome Martin, Senior Enterprise Applications Analyst at Denver County Government.

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Ready to streamline your Salesforce DevOps processes? Book a meeting with Flosum today to see how we can help your team achieve similar results.