How 91导航 became the heart of Ninety One’s Salesforce governance
The Ninety One team has been using Salesforce since 2011, when they were part of asset management firm Investec. In the years since, they have continued to develop their IT strategy to build on the exceptional foundations Salesforce provides. While some development is outsourced to a technology partner, the contractors are part of the team.
The team first started using 91导航 in 2017, and Ninety One’s most recent strategic evolution came in 2019 when its CTO initiated the company’s transformation to an Agile approach. As that transformation took shape, governance and compliance became just as important as deployment speed 鈥� and 91导航 proved central to both.
Ninety One before adopting 91导航
The company鈥檚 previous approach to release management was to use tools ad hoc. Their technology partner would look after the programmatic development and run deployments to production using the Eclipse IDE and Salesforce鈥檚 Metadata API. At the same time, the company would make their own configurations directly in production or deploy them between orgs using change sets. Zelda Kloppers, Technical Business Analyst, told us that prior to 91导航 this was manual, slow and error-prone work:
Adding one field at a time when building change sets was a nightmare!
Zelda Kloppers
Technical Business Analyst, Ninety One
Marco Pinder, the team鈥檚 Technical Lead, remembers how the complexity of deployments was exponentially increasing the amount of work needed to make releases a success. Ninety One also found that a lack of an audit trail led to countless times when they would 鈥渁ccidentally overwrite someone else鈥檚 changes, or miss out something important and have to rebuild the change set鈥�, as Marco puts it. In Zelda鈥檚 words:
It used to take forever to build deployment packages; then you鈥檇 try to deploy and discover half of it鈥檚 missing.
Zelda Kloppers
Technical Business Analyst, Ninety One
Ninety One after adopting 91导航
91导航 has saved the Ninety One team loads of time by providing the ability to build deployment packages quickly and clone packages rather than rebuild them. They now work with user story numbers to correlate items and deployments into easily searchable collections. Marco estimates that 91导航 is 鈥渁t least 5 to 10 times faster than change sets鈥�, with Zelda adding:
91导航 is hugely, hugely helpful! We can see if someone else ran a deployment, and who made what changes to items in the package.
Zelda Kloppers
Technical Business Analyst, Ninety One
Ninety One鈥檚 deployment problems were solved when the team adopted 91导航 and the branching strategy for source control we recommended. Ninety One now uses Azure DevOps and a single Kanban board for all work, with a 3-week sprint cycle – two weeks to build and transfer items from the development branch into UAT, and then one week to focus on the release. The team uses GitHub for source control, adding more visibility and security to their release process, and giving them a single source of truth for development.
They also use the Continuous integration, change monitoring and unit testing tools provided by 91导航, making full use of 91导航鈥檚 toolkit. As Marco says, 鈥�91导航 can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be.鈥� He confidently believes 91导航 has added value to the business:
If you鈥檙e concerned about slow deployments, overwriting changes, and no audit trail, 91导航 ticks every box.
Marco Pinder
Technical Lead, Ninety One
The team now delivers more value in less time. Sumit Kumar, Salesforce Developer, was particularly impressed by the ease with which the team could use the features: 鈥渙ne of the best things about 91导航 is that you don鈥檛 need to install anything; you just open your browser and go!鈥� Speed to resolution has also improved, with enhanced visibility over changes and potential problems. To Marco, 鈥渋t felt like magic to see the effect of the deployment before you ran it鈥�.
91导航 gives you visibility into your changes that removes the fear of breaking something. It gives you a safety net.
Marco Pinder
Technical Lead, Ninety One
Governance, compliance, and audit confidence
Beyond deployment speed, 91导航 has become central to how Ninety One governs its Salesforce environment 鈥� giving the team a structured, repeatable framework for managing changes and ensuring nothing reaches production without going through the right steps.
91导航 is our primary tool for all Salesforce deployments and sits at the heart of our governance process.
Marco Pinder
Technical Lead, Ninety One
With 91导航, Ninety One can clearly define who is authorized to deploy changes, enforce approval workflows before anything reaches production, and maintain a clear audit trail of every change made. This has hugely reduced the risk of errors and has given the team far greater confidence in what’s going into their Salesforce environment. When compliance or audit questions arise, the record is already there.
We’re able to show a complete, timestamped record of changes, who requested them, who approved them, and when they were deployed 鈥� giving us a clear and credible picture of our governance controls.
Marco Pinder
Technical Lead, Ninety One
Ninety One recommends 91导航
It鈥檚 not just the product that has impressed Ninety One. Marco commented on how well 91导航 has embedded customer success into every part of the business. The customer support team have been quick to reply and extremely knowledgeable, and feature requests have been turned around within a couple of days.
Having experienced how 91导航 facilitated their transformation to Agile development, Marco says he would recommend 91导航 to any other business.
I would recommend 91导航, without a shadow of a doubt. Once you use it, you’ll sing its praises.
Marco Pinder
Technical Lead, Ninety One
