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Process & Operations
Organisation & Change
Technology & AI
Salesforce is the connective tissue of this business. Sales works in it. Marketing relies on it. Customer service, R&D, and quality teams each have their own corners of the platform. It has grown organically over years, shaped by whoever needed something at the time, and it functions. That is both its strength and its problem.
Ownership is unclear. When something needs to change, there is no defined process for evaluating the request, approving it, testing it, or rolling it back if it goes wrong. Changes happen because someone asks and someone else figures it out. Data quality has eroded to the point where leadership questions the reports the platform produces. Security and visibility rules have been layered on top of each other so many times that the logic behind them is no longer fully understood by anyone. Every adjustment carries risk because the dependencies are invisible.
Previous efforts have tried to fix individual symptoms. A new field here, an access permission there, a report rebuilt from scratch. Each fix is reasonable on its own, but the cumulative effect is a platform that keeps getting more complex without getting more reliable. The underlying operating model has never been addressed.
We are delivering a nine-step transformation programme structured in three phases across 2026: foundation, stabilisation, and improvement. The decision to lead with governance is deliberate. A Salesforce environment this embedded in the organisation cannot be fixed technically until the questions of ownership, decision rights, and change discipline are settled.
In the foundation phase, we established a cross-functional working group that brings together representatives from every business function using the platform. We built a governance model that defines how changes are requested, evaluated, prioritised, approved, and released. Domain ownership is mapped so that every object, every field, every automation has someone accountable for it.
From there, the programme is moving into security. We are translating business process requirements into a complete security redesign and implementing it in controlled waves. Each wave covers a specific domain, includes user acceptance testing, and runs with a hypercare period afterwards. Controlled because in an environment where visibility rules have accumulated over years, changing access for one team can surface unexpected effects in another.
In parallel, a sustained metadata and data clean-up programme is running across core objects. Fields that serve no purpose are being retired. Naming conventions are being standardised. Duplicate and orphaned records are being resolved. This is unglamorous work, and it is the reason the platform will eventually be trustworthy again.
We are also delivering a custom R&D tracking solution within the platform and evaluating the roadmap for service and campaign capabilities. Every decision runs through the governance framework. That is the point. The framework exists so that the next five years of changes follow a predictable path instead of repeating the pattern that created the problem.
The phrase comes up often in this programme and it is worth explaining what it means in practice. Every conversation starts with what the business needs, not with what Salesforce can do. When a team requests a change, the first question is about the process they are trying to support. The platform configuration follows from that answer.
The governance structure is in place. Domain ownership is clear. The security model is being rebuilt methodically, domain by domain. Data quality is improving with every sprint. What is taking shape is a Salesforce environment where the cost of change goes down over time, where each change is made within a system designed to absorb it, and where knowledge lives in the model rather than in the heads of individuals who happen to remember why something was set up a certain way.
