SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome! You are listening to the CRM Success Show, where you will hear from CRM executives who have overseen some of the most interesting and complex CRM implementations. Your hosts, David Masri and Kiro Whitey, will be bringing you real stories, real insight. Follow along on social media for updates on new episode releases, exclusive content, and much more. Enjoy the show and thanks for listening.

SPEAKER_02 0:28

Welcome to the CRM Sisguest Show. I'm Dave Mastery. And I'm Kira Witsi. And today we're talking with uh Chris Barber, uh VP of Applications, and he's going to be telling us about his time with the Bank of Oklahoma.

SPEAKER_01 0:43

Yeah, I'm uh definitely glad to be here and be able to talk with you guys. Uh much mentioned, my name is Chris Barber. I'm uh in the management role at uh Bank of Oklahoma. We're about a uh $50 billion in asset-sized bank, so not uh not not exactly small. I manage a few managers and several delivery teams working on uh delivering on Salesforce, and uh we're currently rolling out uh Encino's bank operating system for uh loan origination.

SPEAKER_04 1:14

Fantastic. So so Chris, before we look at the current and the and and the as is and looking at the future, I want I want you to catch your mind back to uh almost six years ago, which is when you joined the bank um 2018. Give give our give our guests, uh our listeners, um, you know, an over you know, kind of an overview of what was the the environment that you inherited. Um, you know, were they currently using Salesforce? If they were, what was the maturity level, et cetera, et cetera?

SPEAKER_01 1:44

Yeah, I can talk through that. So yeah, I joined the bank in 2018, and uh ironically, I was managing uh a different team at the time. Uh our bank has a real strong internal mobility program. So after you spend a period of time in one role, you can look around and explore other roles. So I was managing a team that supported credit services, and it was everything downstream from our loan systems, ALS and ACBS. After that, I ended up managing a team that uh supported Treasury Services, um, rolled out a new cash management platform there behind uh a new internally developed commercial portal. And then I had the pleasure of uh uh coming over here to work on the Salesforce team. So that was uh January of 2022. So we had uh my first exposure to Salesforce. I expected it to be like managing an ERP system, um, which I've done before. That's you know not necessarily fun, but it's it's fun to work on something large. Um, I will say Salesforce is nothing like that. It's a much more fun platform, uh, a lot more flexibility, a lot more opportunity to be creative with it. We had uh purchased Salesforce back in 2005, and it was actually our line of business who's who did it. They brought it in-house. It wasn't even until 2010 before it actually rolled up under IT. So it was always something that was uh well established and has done nothing but grow in uh in that since that time. We started with 150 users and run right now we're just under 2,000 users. So as a platform that we are continuing to expand upon and we're looking at adding uh more users next year, more lines of business onto it uh to help them with their uh their sales enablement and loan origination.

SPEAKER_04 3:35

So so just uh um great great insight, Chris. Um just to kind of give our listeners a feel for um, you know, if they're not familiar with the financial services industry or banks uh in particular, um why and how would Bank of Oklahoma use Salesforce? Um would would an everyday customer see Salesforce behind the scenes when they're going to make a deposit or a withdrawal, et cetera, or when they raise a ticket on the app? Just kind of give give us a feel for the use case of using Salesforce on a day-to-day.

SPEAKER_02 4:11

Yeah, just tagging on to that question. Sorry, just tagging on to that question. Uh maybe also a little bit about Encino for our listeners who are not familiar with it.

SPEAKER_01 4:20

So we um use Salesforce Financial Services Cloud. So it's the financial services vector or vertical on Salesforce. So a bank has many different lines of business, many different kinds of roles that they perform. Uh, your use case you talked about of a user walking up at a branch, that's what we call consumer. Other banks call it retail. That's that public user interface and their engagement. Um there are other roles, other lines of business. Um, we are a commercial bank. Uh, that's kind of where our bread and butter is servicing commercials companies. So you can think of things like uh you know, research, at woods, hobby lobby, uh, large companies from nationwide down to small businesses who have you know 10 employees, being able to service their financial service needs. Hey, you need money to store an account, you need money to move around, depending upon how big of a company you are, you may be sending wires domestically or internationally, or doing bill payments. Um, you know, we offer that service also. So there's a large list of financial services that we provide, um, both then consumer and commercial. Then you have uh the wealth space. So these are individuals who have a large amount of assets that we help them manage. Um, then there's you know, treasury. Treasury is that cash movement around in uh in commercial. So whether it be physical or uh digital. So providing, like you as a consumer, have a website you can log on to. Well, we have the same thing for a company where they can manage the variety of accounts that they've got because sometimes they'll they'll serve different purposes. You know, you'll have account for payroll, you'll have an account for accounts payable. So allowing them to be able to manage their money that way.

SPEAKER_04 6:15

Understood. And and um just out of curiosity before we move on to um you know a bit more about kind of the Salesforce and the projects um that you're overseeing. Um curious, uh, you know, any particular line of business um that has been more complex or or involves maybe more data, more compliance, uh i.e. consumer versus commercial versus wealth management, um, any any kind of nuances that those different lines of businesses uh bring when it comes to tech and sales force? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:50

So um, Maz, the question you uh tagged on was about talking about Encino, that's loan origination. So if you come to us as a company and say, hey, I want to build a new building, I need $100 million because there's building a skyscraper, that's the process of us doing the due diligence, collecting the right documents, being able to assess the risk of this loan. Um now, the why I mentioned that is you had brought up the you know the complexity of different lines of businesses. Uh, I would say commercial probably is the uh the most uh varied. Um loans can be small, $100,000 to mega loans where they're $100 million and syndicated, which means we're we're partnering with other banks to be able to build this loan package together to be able to share the risk across uh the different institutions versus one bank taking on all the loans. So it's uh it's pretty amazing to see the amount of difference in the scale of companies. Somebody who are operating an LLC where they have a lawnmowing business, you know, they have a lot less assets than uh somebody who's operating nationwide with you know hundreds or thousands of stores. And so that's uh kind of that space that I would say would be the most complicated that uh we've been dealing with.

SPEAKER_04 8:18

And and just for context as well, um for those that might not be familiar, um Encino essentially is a cloud-based banking software um native to Salesforce. I I think we're we're good at saying that um yeah, um used by just under 2,000 um financial institutions. Um it is on the you know, it's a publicly traded business. If people want to learn more about Encino, um there's plenty of um information out there, but um partnering with Salesforce um for as long as I make a remember, at least 10, 12, 12 years, um and very um you know, banking and specific, very popular in the banking space. Um so um that's Chris um for more about Encino offline, and then feel free to uh there's putting your resources out there, like I said. Over to you, Matthew.

SPEAKER_02 9:08

Yeah, yeah. Encino um Nino's like definitely one of the larger meetings. Um, right, those guys. Um yeah, so you just you said you joined in 2022, right? So why don't you tell us a little bit about um I guess the state of things were like what you came into, why you were hired, um, and then right, uh I guess what what was your mandate, right? What and or what was your like I guess 30, 60, 90, five-year plan, you know, for the platform. Um how that came.

SPEAKER_01 9:43

I think it was an interesting time to join. Um we had made the decision in I think uh late 2019 that we wanted to move forward with implementing in C now for our loan origination, which short version, super complex workflow is really what it is. You have different people along the stages who need to do different things, document different things, and and show that we've collected X amount of data and documents to assess the risk of the loan and then managing the life of the loan once it gets approved. So very large, transformational. It changed how people do their day jobs at the bank. Um, so that was something that was a really large project. It started with Deloitte as our implementation partner, and uh they came in because they had experience with uh implementing Encino at uh other banks. Um, like I said, it's a workflow. Um, and every line of business has their own processes for how they manage uh that data movement around. When I joined in 2022, we had uh Encino. Um we were rolled out our first line of business onto the Encino platform in uh April of 22. And so when I joined in, we had already been through a bunch of bumps and hurdles of learning how to do this work, and uh we were able to roll that out, and then we were definitely experiencing growing because there was a lot of learning that occurs. Um, a lot of people have this misconception that Salesforce is easy to just take and implement and adopt. But uh yeah, it's not as simple as installing Excel. I'll tell you that.

SPEAKER_02 11:32

Oh, yeah, a little bit. Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:35

Okay, well, anything you do on the Salesforce platform is complex and complicated, and it takes a lot of learning to be able to figure it out. Um, because at this point you're you're building a product. So you're having to go and find out what is you know, what's the current state now? Where's where's the operational state of Siri just turned on? Uh the operational state of uh where you want to go and are there improvements there. And Salesforce really allows you to have that customizability to shape the box to be whatever you want. So you can make it as uh out-of-the-box vanilla workflow or as um as customize or as scale up to be whatever you need to be able to deliver for the line of business you're supporting. So I joined, we had uh still had an implementation partner. We had worked on getting rid of uh some other vendors that we had involved. And uh historically, it was we had one team that supported Salesforce CRM and then a separate team that did Encino, and then we had our implementation partner. And so I was kind of bought in to help meld everything together into uh into one team. So we needed to be able to deliver on um the Salesforce platform, CRM, sales enablement for the existing lines of businesses on the platform. There are probably 12, 1300 people, and then we were rolling out Encino and creating those uh custom workflows, custom screens, uh leveraging the the Encino framework and their their engine. So it was a lot of uh a lot of change going on. Uh we hadn't as a bank don't typically try and do these very, very large transformational projects. Um you know, it's like trying to run um, you know, it's trying, it's like trying to uh have the Olympics. Um we try and avoid those very large things like that. But uh we needed to uh mature uh what we were doing because we were we were uh have the have the luckiness of being successful at what we're doing. And so we're doing nothing but growing. And with crossing the uh the $50 billion in assets work, uh it changes the amount of regulations that you have. So there's a lot of regulatory concerns that we needed to make sure that we could meet uh because that's not optional. And then we're also looking at hey, there's efficiencies in our processes. Um, the existing loan origination process was very manual, word documents, spreadsheets, data entered into dozens of systems. And so we want to have one single pane of truth. So the mission became how do we grow and scale? Um, our original Salesforce team was six people, and then we had another half dozen or so on Encino, and so we had a team of you know 12 to 15 people, and you know, was that the right size? What do we need to do to make sure that we're successful on delivering on everything that we have on our plate? Because one of the challenges with Salesforce is users get a hold of it and then they want more of it, and so then it's the the case of how do you grow and scale to be able to meet uh the outcomes that your business is trying to achieve.

SPEAKER_02 14:47

Okay, so you said you had the three uh three teams, right? Um, I think you said Encino, a Salesforce team, and an outside vendor team.

SPEAKER_01 14:55

Yeah, Deloitte's an offshore data model.

SPEAKER_02 14:59

Also Salesforce, though? Like what was Deloitte doing if not Salesforce?

SPEAKER_01 15:03

Uh they were doing Encino. And so so we've got what was the Encino team doing? So we had Encino providing some consulting services.

SPEAKER_02 15:12

Oh, oh, oh, in Scino, the company was involved as well.

SPEAKER_01 15:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:17

Yeah, oh okay, okay, okay. That makes sense.

SPEAKER_01 15:20

Okay, we purchased uh some time from them to get like some of their architects of like, hey, you have this module, how's this actually work?

SPEAKER_02 15:28

Okay, cool. So you said you you you wanted to meld that into one team because it was causing issues. Um, so can you tell us a little bit about what those issues that were that it was causing, and then right how you know what you did, how did you restructure the team? Um, and then I guess how that went.

SPEAKER_01 15:45

Yeah. So there were a lot of uh communication issues. Um there were a lot of um everybody kind of working off their own to-do list. Um one of the things when you're working on a large proxy, you have a single backlog. All work needs to come up into one into one backlog so you can work it, prioritize it, have the visibility and awareness of what was going on. Um we had uh developers kind of all you know operating to their own drum in terms of you know how they were uh implementing you know the features that we were trying to develop. We had um different branches and our source control repository that we had to bring back together because we had Deloitte for 18 months doing developments over on this long-lived feature branch. And hey, we've got our operational branch of where we go to production. We need to bring everything together. So we needed to uh learn how to scale our team, how to handle communication. When you have a daily stand-up with 15 people in it, you know, it's too easy to hide. And so we had a lot of uh learnings that occurred along the way that were really geared towards well, how do we do this better? How can we deliver faster? How can we increase our throughput? How can we improve the quality of what we were delivering? So we were examining. Um, we originally were a waterfall project, transitioned over to Scrum, um, started uh that process of making all the work visible. Like I said, having one backlog, using JIRA to be able to show the work, who's doing what, when, where, where do we have dependencies, where do we have bottlenecks. And those just started to show show us what problems we had we needed to go solve for. Communication was definitely one of them. Um after we merged together the teams and uh we ended up adding more people because that ends up happening, and uh we split up into uh smaller subteams. So, hey, you know, we got a team that just does data conversion, data migration. Um, that's a unique skill set. You know, that's TSQL, writing store procedures, ETL, SSIS. We we had informatica in the beginning. So that's different than Apex or Lightning Web Component development. So we kind of looked at where are those natural work fractures to be able to split the teams out. So people working towards a specific problem would have the right uh part of the platform. We were able to limit the cognitive workflow, the uh cognitive load. Nobody's gonna understand everything soup to nuts. So, how do we have people focus on, hey, what's the the initial part of the loan origination? You know, what's the part of the platform that you know Treasury uses? How can we specialize in having a small team that can support that? Um, so we I could spend forever kind of talking through some of those problems, but uh that was kind of the start of our journey of improvement was adopting some of those modern ways of working and adopting that continuous learning uh and continuous improvement culture to where we were able to uh you know measure our throughput and watch it go up. Um, like I said, the demand is always insatiable on the Salesforce platform. So it's how do you get better at doing delivery?

SPEAKER_02 19:05

Yeah, tough challenge. Um so I know you also said you have three teams. Any issues with uh finger pointing? That's particularly when they're different organizations, that sometimes can be an issue. Um and then I mean that's a quick answer, hopefully. And then um also would like to know, I'm sure listeners would love to know a little bit about like the actual business goals, right? Not just um development efficiency, like like what it you know, the what the corporate goal to accomplish with these enhancements to Salesforce.

SPEAKER_01 19:36

Yeah, so um, yes, when you have uh lots of people, especially when you have vendors involved who um you know have contracts that they're trying to uh adhere towards, it's real easy to get into that finger-pointing situation. Um, you know, to work your way out around that. It's really around that shared understanding of the work that needs to be done, which is uh you know, where Scrum and uh um using agile tools like Jira kind of come into play there. Um business goals that we were trying to accomplish. Um we had obviously some strict regulatory requirements that we had to meet. And then we also knew that we wanted to improve our um our lead time on being able to uh deliver loans, for one example, um, you know, where it would take X number of, you know, is it if a loan is going to take three months to get approval, what can we do to improve that where we can take that cycle time down to a month or less? You know, being able to identify where do we have bottlenecks in our loan origination process to help improve that cycle time. Loans have different stages, you know, if it's pre-booking, post-booking, approval, you know, where does a loan spend all of its time? So we want to collect metrics. And the other really big uh um business objective is we really wanted to um be able to exploit data. The data we collect on a loan is a large amount, and you combine that with our CRM data. You know, who are our customers, what are the businesses that they have, what are they doing, where are they trying to grow, being able to match that with our loan data, because we want to you know scale up what we do with um with sales. We wanted to be able to provide a better customer experience to our clients and having more data and having that closer to our relationship managers who work directly with our end users. And so that's uh was uh one of the other main objectives that we wanted to accomplish.

SPEAKER_04 21:44

That's great. I I guess from a uh reflection standpoint, um, you know, in the in the short term uh at least, um, how how did that go in terms of uh the overall customer experience and improving that for the for the clients? With it were the metrics that you were Utilizing to measure what better business you know experience look like for your clients. And um, you know, if there were, you know, could you share a little bit more about what they were and how you came about about that being the metric?

SPEAKER_01 22:17

So metrics. The uh in the beginning, since I like I mentioned, uh, we were having data spread across different systems, it uh was real hard to have any kind of baseline of like what does normal look like? Um, and so that was kind of the the first uh first stab that we took at metrics is um what how long does it take for us to accomplish being able to service our clients? You know, on the Salesforce side with uh sales enablement, you know, it's a little bit easier to uh be able to say, hey, if I meet with the client, I've got X number of time before I need to respond back to them. You know, you track those with events and tasks. Uh we didn't have anything like that on the uh uh loan origination side. And so that's something that we had to build out of how long does a loan sit in each of these stages, how quickly are we able to service our clients, and how quickly are we able to get feedback from our clients of how are they happier with the new process? Um, nobody's gonna disagree with the statement that uh clients want information faster. And so that's uh kind of the metric that one of the main metrics that we were trying to monitor was how quickly are we giving back to clients with information? Um, are we able to uh reduce the number of times that they're calling in asking for information? Um so those are just some basic metrics of you know, how well is this client engagement going between what we're doing behind the walls here at the bank to uh being able to actually service our own clients?

SPEAKER_04 24:01

So time, uh reduction in time, uh limiting the the uh communication to to to kind of free up the customer service teams? Um any anything that surprised you with that when you were kind of um, you know, did you work out, for example, before you answer that question, did you work out like how many what the average time to complete a loan was? You know, because in the management varied depending on the size of the loan, perhaps. But were you able to, were there, was there any data there initially to work out, okay, an average loan takes us 30 days, for example?

SPEAKER_01 24:34

Yeah, that's that's one of the challenges we had. We didn't have a baseline.

unknown 24:38

Right.

SPEAKER_01 24:39

Um and so that's something we've had to learn along the way of like what does normal look like? And as we add more lines of business onto Encino, being able to kind of monitor that to go, okay, well, as we're adding more people, adding more functionality, are we still able to keep up with uh what we had done when we first started? Have we seen improvements? It also helps us with uh uh you know better cash management prediction of, hey, when a loan gets to a certain stage, pretty good chance it's going to be approved and actually turn into business. And so we're able to better uh predict or uh with that uh now that we have more data. The uh the ability to um for the RMs to be able to better manage their portfolio uh was definitely something that uh I would say was a little bit of a surprise of how much they really enjoyed being able to have a holistic view across all loans of all of their clients. Um that wasn't something that I expected. I expected their behavior to be, well, does a specific client have? Versus, hey, here's across all my clients, where do we sit with the financial products that we're providing?

SPEAKER_04 25:49

Were there any um were there any challenges along the way that related to um you know the people side of things? I know um you talked a little bit earlier about the different different teams involved, different voices at the table, condensing that to a lot more kind of an internal focus uh over the years as you've added more users. I know that team's kind of times four, right? You know now it's kind of in the 40s in terms of head count. So what what what maybe surprised you or was unexpected around the people side a little bit more in terms of getting those skill sets that you needed, um, be it Encino, be it Salesforce, be it data, be it architecture, et cetera?

SPEAKER_01 26:30

Yeah, so there were definitely a lot of uh unexpected things on the people side. Um dealing for the I think the first challenge was the uncertainty of doing something as large as this, something we hadn't done before. Um, you know, how do you how do you tell somebody about something that they've never experienced? Operating at a scale that you've never thought you would be at. Um, you know, we're at 45 people now on the IT side supporting uh all these efforts. Um, you know, the problems are different when you have a team that big. Getting that shared understanding of the problem you're trying to solve uh is really challenging. Um, getting people um, you know, in the beginning, having Deloitte, it was that contractor model. People are just order order receivers. Somebody needs to tell them what to do when they do it. Um, shifting that away towards where it's internally developed. Um, you know, it's the challenge of making that shift of I'm here to solve the problem, bring me the problem, and I'll help design what the solution is that what you need. Uh, that was definitely a shift. Um the culture is definitely harder. The bigger you get, the harder it is to maintain a psychologically safe culture. Um, bringing in people from all over um in a short period of time. You know, this has been a large growth in the last two years or so. Um, so that was something that was really hard. We took hiring very seriously. Uh, we uh had a really high bar. We only wanted to bring in people who would raise the bar, who would raise the average of what's on the team. Salesforce is a unique platform. Uh, I think people don't realize, I know I didn't, how powerful of a platform it is. How much can you do with Apex and Flow? Um it's real easy when you're smaller. Um, when it was just FSC before in Cena, we had 40,000 lines of code. We're north of 150,000 lines of code now. So at that point, you're operating at a scale where architecture, design patterns, software engineering that matters. Uh, because code is maybe written once, but it's going to be changed thousands of times. And so technical debt becomes a big problem when you start having so many people working on the code of if everybody's doing everything differently. So, how do you have good governance over the development practices? You know, every time somebody does a merge request, here's a checklist of here's the 10 things you need to make sure they did right. We need to have multiple code reviews along the way um before things actually go to production. At the same time, you have to balance that with the flow of delivery. Blueprint can't can't drop. So, how do you ensure quality as you're trying to move fast? Uh so those were some of the challenges that uh that we faced uh early on on the people side of um taking on something they haven't done before requires learning. So, how do you have people develop that continuous learning process? And then the balancing the speed of need to deliver, how do you implement continuous improvement practices? You know, teaching people about the the uh seven forms of lean waste in software development, why handoffs are bad, why WIP is bad, uh, why you don't want to be overproducing. Don't produce code nobody's gonna be using. Um, so that those were a lot of the learnings that we've had to help with our team. Um so I've been able to uh bring in some people who don't have Salesforce experience, who have traditional software development backgrounds, um, people with computer science degrees who can come in and help us make sure that we're doing things um smart right the first time, uh, because it's very expensive to fix stuff after it goes live. Um you have a lot of change management activities if you're gonna be uh changing things out, changing things out from users as they're they're using the platform.

SPEAKER_04 30:45

No, I think I think it's um it's it's an interesting one as you grow and and and scale fast. How do you uh keep the quality there, whether it's people, whether it's um you know technology, whether it's um documentation, whatever it might be, right? Because uh deadlines, you're you're now overnight use it kind of um, maybe not quite overnight, but but it might have felt overnight at the time, but overnight you're doing three amount of code, right? Um you're four exercises in the team, um, and you know who knows how how many times expectations internally, um, you know, maybe 100,000 times expectations, but um with quality, specifically with quality, and and you talk about you know the code piece around the quality. Um what maybe surprised you around that was the team receptive um to keeping the high bar of code with the with a kind of like you know, Chris code is code, it doesn't matter if you know it gets it gets used, it's there, and you know, it's not taking up space, just deploy it or whatever. Um any anything around that piece in Citico that maybe causing eyebrows to be raised or yeah, I can talk about that.

SPEAKER_01 31:56

Um so in the beginning, the schedule mattered more than quality. I was trying to figure out could we get something delivered? Um, and that's something you would see typically more like a startup. You know, if you if you can't get a product to uh the market, it doesn't really matter how well it's written. And so there was that initial stage of we just have to move fast. We don't have time to say, no, this is bad. So I brought up technical debt before. Sometimes technical debt is technical debt is code that is harder to change in the future. But sometimes you make the conscious decision, I need the speed of delivery now to get enough out there to really understand do I have the right market fit with my product? And so we did a lot of that in the beginning. Um being able to bring in some uh um some tools, um, static code analysis tools. I mean, those provide some qualitative metrics around how much technical debt do you have and where is it specifically? Um what was your favorite form, Chris? Just to give a favorite. Uh Autorabbit code scan is my favorite. Um, it's got a lot of rules uh around Salesforce. I think they have like 400 rules that you can pick from. Um, and we're able to customize it. We've uh uh matured how we use the product. At first, it was just an awareness tool of hey, here's a dashboard showing you how many bugs that it it calls out, how many security vulnerabilities, um, how many code smells we are not following Salesforce best practices. So that really then provides some information for decision makers like myself to be able to go, okay, well, here's where I need to put focus. Platform health needs to matter. I need to have a team supporting addressing what these things are because this is such a critical platform. Um, so that's uh that's the tool that we use. And then we've also brought in uh Capado's a robotic testing tool. So we're able to automate a lot of the regression because in the beginning, it would take two weeks, so an entire sprint, for our QB team to go in and manually regress the platform. And we were doing that for the three Salesforce releases a year, and then NCNO operates, I believe, up to four a year. So that's that's a really hit, hard hit to your throughput. So we focused on the initial thing was automating the manual regression that we were doing so that we would have that feedback within 24 hours of taking a Salesforce release to our sandbox, we would have an idea. Was it going to break something? We're continuing to uh um kind of go down that uh quality pyramid from the UI down to the API and the unit test. Uh Salesforce requires unit tests, um, so that's great. Um, that's something that uh, you know, it was definitely a best practice when doing software delivery. You want that fast feedback to your developers. So we're currently looking at um you know how do we get better at developing unit tests? Um, it was always something that was done as a well, I have to to check the checkbox. Well, are we really testing the right things? Do we have an understanding of really where we have the right coverage? Um, if you have a class that's you know 6,000 lines of code, but you're only testing 20% of it, um, do you have risk there? And so we're looking at, you know, it's all about how do we get better at what we do? And tools are enablers to provide you information or feedback to help decide where you need to go next with the problems that you need to be solving.

SPEAKER_02 35:38

Well, um Field First, obviously, like you said, it's a testing first platform, right? You have to write your tests before you can deploy, and you have to hit, I think, what, 75, 80% code coverage?

SPEAKER_01 35:49

75, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 35:50

So like were you finding cheating or just floppiness, or when you just thing, let me just get it to pass the test so I can deploy, and then the testing becomes a tech debt as well.

SPEAKER_01 36:04

Right. When you see a test class that says assert equal true, you know they're cheating. So that's something that we had to uh you know add to our um uh code review and uh um merge requests. Yeah. So we would look through and be like, hey, I see you checking in a change to this class. Here's the three unit tests that you wrote. They all say assert equal true. I can't let that go forward. So we would send it back and force um our partner to fix those things before we would allow that code to come in.

SPEAKER_02 36:39

Oh, your partner did that.

SPEAKER_01 36:41

I I can neither confirm nor deny. But we realized the importance of quality because we were having quality issues early on, and environments weren't in sync. They weren't, you would get one behavior in one environment and a different behavior in another environment. Um, you know, it's essential for your code base to be the source of truth. What's in your code repo needs to be the source of truth. You can't rely on the stars lining up between your environments to match. And so that's something that we've learned along the way of how important it is to be aware of your technical debt, make sure you manage it, and manage that that quality sector there. Um one of the things that uh we've uh modified is you know where we run our unit test. We're able to uh cherry pick uh from you know, we have eight hours worth of unit tests on the Salesforce side. Well, if I'm making a change to this one class, only these three tests need to run. And so we're able to get that fast feedback versus waiting two, four up to four hours for all the the entire suite to run.

SPEAKER_02 37:52

And then we were having that let's move on. I think uh it's a little bit too much on test classes. Um, as as interesting as it is. So yeah, let's move it back to your change control. Um so you talked a lot about change control with the IT, the IT organization that you took over, right? Um, but of course you have a whole user base um and they're new to and oh they're new, right? Lots of changes coming to the Salesforce platform. Um plus you're trying to manage technet and clean that up while I guess they're asking for new features and changes or real defects even worse, let's say. Um so how did you balance that kind of let's say change management so that you get the training there? Uh how many users do you have also? I don't think you told us. And then um and not just the change management for balancing the you know, getting your house in order with the technical debt and the technology with the bombardment of like do this, we need this, we need this, this would be great, you know.

SPEAKER_01 38:57

Yeah, so that's uh it's a multi-pronged question that you just asked there. So change management is definitely very challenging. Um we are product owners um for uh most of them came from the line of business side, so they're quite well aware of uh being it's uh they've done the job. So showing them, hey, here's the new platform, they can point out exactly where it is change. Um along the way, we've learned to incorporate the users sooner in our process to get that feedback, and that really helps with the change management. Um, where we've got this project really splitting up into three phases to deploy in Ceno. And the first phase was uh uh a commercial line business, which is more like smaller companies. They didn't see the platform until, I believe, the month before we went live. So we didn't get a chance to really get feedback from them. Second project, we we were able to bring them in, uh, a smaller set of people more frequently to get feedback. Uh, but it was still something that we realized as we went to our third release of how important it is to have multiple cycles where you're having lots of different people come in and touch the platform, even though it's not ready yet for use, so they can start to get familiar with the amount of change that's coming. And then uh helping them document that what their processes are. Uh, that was also a great way to help deal with the change of uh documenting what your current state is and being able to shift it to show them what their future state is. Because that's how you get people used to change, is you make the analogy of this how this is how this relates to your current job.

SPEAKER_04 40:42

In terms of uh you I guess you can wrap up if you want, Chris. I was gonna ask you uh very quickly, just in terms of um kind of overall success of the um the project, right? Particularly with the lone origination piece with Encino, um overall, if you had to rate it out of 10, how successful would you say it was? And um moving into kind of um general advice and insight and lessons learned, uh, which you touched on a little bit, but but rating out of 10 and and you know, if if if it wasn't a 10, um, what other advice would you give to other banks and and leaders like yourself that are looking to implement Encino or are currently on their Encino journey?

SPEAKER_01 41:31

Yeah. Um I think just to wrap up Maz's last question, the last part was really around governance, and that's something that we had to uh kind of evolve along the way. When you have multiple cooks in the kitchen, how do you prioritize against the value of what they want to have delivered? Uh, because like I said, the the demand's always insatiable. Now, Kiro, to your point, uh, your question around uh you know scale of one to ten, here I'm gonna give the answer is it depends. Um, every line of business we've learned something with. Um, and so where it may have been a five in 2022, it's more like an eight now in 2024, because we've learned as we've come along the way. Um now for lessons learned and kind of advice going forward. I mean, I can spend an entire podcast talking about just that topic.

SPEAKER_04 42:26

The 60 second version, Chris.

SPEAKER_01 42:29

All right, 60 second version. Um, getting the culture right is is really challenging. Understanding what matters, and for me, my journey has really been how do you operate at scale? So then it becomes um, you know, how do you have that learning culture? How do you have that improvement culture? Because you can't predict the future of what's gonna happen uh with what you're doing. So, what are those countermeasures and developing that culture of you know servant leadership, um, you know, self-management, uh, some of the scrum values, uh, that's really important to help your team position themselves for taking on a journey of the unknown.

SPEAKER_04 43:16

Fantastic. And and and tell us, Chris, was the along the journey, um, were there any kind of key light bulb moments um, you know, that that you kind of experienced? And I know you spoke about your passion uh for teaching and others and seeing a light bulb go off in when you're kind of teaching that teaching others, but um what about for you? What was your light bulb moment on the project?

SPEAKER_01 43:40

Uh for me, um I would say for me, the uh the value of uh of continuous improvement. Um I've worked on lots of large projects before where you just grin and bear it and you just take it until it gets done. Uh, but learning how you can Deliver successfully, safely, um, without you know killing everyone with forcing everybody to work 60 hours a week. Um, taking that continuous improvement uh mindset of how can we get better at what we deliver? Where should we remove work in our process that doesn't add value so that we can deliver better, deliver faster, because we're gonna come across something uncertain that's gonna take our time that we didn't expect. You know, I had a vendor tell me it'll take 40 hours to implement this interface, and it took four months. Okay, well, I didn't have four months on my my project plan, but we've implemented other improvements along the way to where we had margin for that. Um, I also can't stress uh um making the work visible so everybody's on the same page of who's doing what and why is it not moving. Because when the work's visible, you then get to see, well, this is in progress, it's been in progress for two days. That's there's a problem there I need to go solve for. So let me uh let me focus on those areas. Um and then the other really big light bulb moment for me was how important architecture and software patterns were when you're operating at that scale. Apex is like Java, and you can apply a lot of those same things that you get from.NET, Java, some of those practices, you know, solid design patterns, clean code. That really helps your developers excel at being able to write more code. And uh at the end of the day, you know, I want I want to be able to do more, I want to be able to do it better, and I want to be able to do it fast.

SPEAKER_04 45:38

No, that's great. And and um it's it's uh it's interesting you mentioned about you know uh the comparisons with Java to Salesforce development. Um often we see on the talent side that the best Salesforce developers are those that started out in Java. So um I'm not too surprised uh to hear you say that. Um, upon reflecting, um knowing what you do now, um, both about banking, the industry, the nuances, the stakeholders, uh, the customers, uh, and also just in general, as you're a few more years in on your Salesforce Nencino uh journey, um, is there anything you would have done differently if you had to start this again tomorrow? Um you know, exact type of project that you you you walked into? And anything at all you would, you know, um yeah, go go go go do differently within a heartbeat.

SPEAKER_01 46:37

Uh the first thing I would say is the gimbal walk. Go to where the work is being done to observe and learn. Um that's the fastest way to get feedback is to get it before you build something. And so if I built a uh you know a practice or a culture of having business analysts go out and watch an underwriter underwrite a loan, watch credit services manage the documentation that they need to manage, watch somebody who uh the RMs who manage the the portfolio maintenance of uh of the loans that they manage. Um, the more you learn about the business and the process of what you're trying to do helps you build a better product.

SPEAKER_02 47:16

Yeah, the technical term for that is ride-alongs. Um believe it or not, yeah, very common, incredibly helpful.

SPEAKER_01 47:23

Yeah, we were having problems with uh spreads, and uh that's hey, all the financial statements for the last 10 years, let me put them in. We send somebody over and they sat next to the guy doing the spreads, and we saw you use the application totally different than what we thought. You don't do it this way, you do it this way. Oh, well that changes our mindset of how we need to be building that screen.

SPEAKER_04 47:49

I think if I was to be asked the uh question on the wrapper brand, the most unappreciated role from the stories that I've I've heard with with many customers, it would be the business analysis role. Um, I I think um, you know, the the emphasis on walking before you run um and get to know how you're currently using X system uh today, because I think you hit the nail on the head. Often um, you know, in IT, the marketing sales, for example, use use the system in one way. Um most of the time there's a massive skill set gap in terms of what that what is capable of platform, especially Salesforce, which you you touched on as well. So so many things you can do, which is amazing, but it can also be the the downside of the platform, right? Um, you know, it's it's never-ending the stuff that you can implement and and and uh plug into your org. So um you you had mentioned Scrum Masters though. So I was curious before we uh before we move on, um, what role did the Scrum Masters play in in your particular project? And um I you you know you you had mentioned that was kind of like your unsung hero. Um so so tell us a little bit more about that.

SPEAKER_01 49:00

So the Scrum Master does a lot to you know facilitate and enable the team to be able to do work. Um they're they're close enough to the work to be able to see the problems, but they're also far enough away to see the impact of the problems, which then helps raise here's the important issues. If you ask every single person that you talk to that you work with, they'll all have a problem of something. But having that more systems thinking across the entire workflow of where are the problems, where are those bottlenecks? Because if you're not optterize optimizing for those constraints, it's not really making a difference in in your flow of work.

SPEAKER_04 49:40

And let's say let's say we got um, you know, because I I know that's kind of like in high, you know, uh in an ideal world where you'd have a schoolmaster, you'd have BAs, you'd have, you know, let's let's say we're we're talking about maybe a smaller credit union. Um we don't have the luxury of a of a full-time you know schoolmaster, Chris. What would you merge that role with, do you think? Um again, no, again, knowing what you know now about the project, um advice for other other leaders, and and we we focused a lot on in the last few minutes about people aspects. So how would you what would you recommend to uh to another uh person like yourself in in similar shoes who wants that scrum master capability but maybe can't get budget for a full 40-hour week scrum master?

SPEAKER_01 50:26

You know, there's a couple different ways I've seen that done before is is the manager takes on that role, excuse me, as the scrum master to be able to facilitate those meetings. Um I've also seen the situation where a business analyst also takes on that role. Um and then I've also been in companies where they'll rotate that role. So for a sprint, a person will be facilitating these meetings. Um that works if you have a team that is uh you know willing to go read the scrum guide. It's like 12 pages, it's not very long. Um, to be able to understand what is you're trying to do, what's the purpose of this meeting, what are we trying to accomplish with it? Uh, where it helps with the scrum masters, you get more facilitation and coaching um experience that they usually bring to the table. You you had mentioned the the business analyst role and you know how important that is. Um you know, there's the aspect of understanding Salesforce, but then also understanding you know what the what the business is doing. And I always recommend that they read the book User Story Mapping, because that's really around how do you have a conversation to walk somebody through, explaining something they do every day, so it's you know, common knowledge to them to be able to extract that out.

SPEAKER_02 51:43

Yeah, so uh oddly enough, um, if you read that three-page uh Scrum Manifesto, the Scrum master is supposed to be a regular team member, it's not supposed to be a dedicated role. That that's how it was initially designed. I think the um the consulting firm nature of the business is kind of needed to position a PM in there because they can't do away with their budgets and their timelines and their scant charts, right? It's just needed because you have contracts. So uh I I think part of it has to do with you know, you're working with vendors, they have contracts, they need to manage a contract. I can't do pure Scrum, and then that rule kind of changes. Um not to mention internally, right? Budgets are just a fact of life, and I don't think if you read the Scrum Manifesto, even the Agile Manifesto, like anybody munches a budget. It's like, oh, you just keep going, right? Um next sprint, next sprint, next sprint, um, never-ending.

SPEAKER_04 52:35

Um Chris, what what's your um what's your thoughts on the whole Encino certification program? What did it did it help your your um your your your your hires in particular? Did you did you seek that skill set when you were looking to hire for them to be encino certified? Or were you just looking at broader sales force, um, you know, talent that were had the aptitude and desire to go out and learn uh Encino? Um because again, you know, everyone uh is is probably uh very familiar with Trailhead and you know it's a phenomenal resource, but but other products and their their kind of educational kind of uh certification programs. What are your thoughts there?

SPEAKER_01 53:17

Yeah, I experienced a lot of uh people who would go and have certifications um but didn't have any kind of real-world experience to be able to explain what they did with that. And that that was one of the challenges I had was you know, do you know the product? Do you know Salesforce and what you can do with an opportunity, with a prospect? And can you translate that to something in your past performance where you've already shown that? Um, you can talk about Lightning Web Force, Lightning Web Component Pages, but what have you done with it? Where has it actually made an improvement in the process? So I'm not against certifications. I mean, it is a piece of information that can help you form an opinion on if this is the right hire, but it definitely should not be the only sole reason that you would hire someone. I interviewed people who had tons of certification, um, but uh couldn't really actually explain uh what you would do to you know leverage your credit bureau or um you know some feature of uh Salesforce or Antino.

SPEAKER_04 54:26

None of them for our listeners were from me, by the way, just so you know.

SPEAKER_02 54:32

Yeah. Um, so it it's interesting, right? Some of some of uh let's say the olders of us, like myself, not so much like Hiro, there at the time, and it wasn't even that long ago, I would think in the mid-20s, right? Mid-20 to 2010, even as that late that people thought of banks as technical dinosaurs. It was like banks and airlines, you know. Um it's nice to know that that's definitely changing. I don't I don't think I've heard somebody say that um recently. They still say it about the airlines, though, of course, right? Um but they'll they'll they'll come they'll come. Um so yeah, so so now, right, the banks clearly have I think fully embrace technology and and in a lot of ways of becoming leaders um in that space, particularly the larger financial services firms, and I'm gonna suggest right um banking. So, yeah, so where where do you see the future with you know with CRM and Salesforce um, you know, in the in the banking industry? Um you know, what's the next evolution there?

SPEAKER_01 55:28

Yeah, so I think there's um you're right, banks are slow. Um, that's historically how they've operated. Um technology is changing. You know, we're we're we're in a state where everything is digital. You know, you have to have a mobile app, you have to have a website. You can't rely on your person answering a phone to do a transaction. So getting more and more digital is uh the future of where we're going. Um, everybody sees that, everybody's aware of that. Um it's just going to expand. Um, now that we're bringing AI into the space, you know, AI allows for consuming information faster to be able to provide recommendations. Um, that's something that's gonna be a game changer with uh Salesforce, particularly, you know, uh, you know, service cloud, you know, being able to have cases where I don't have to spend a lot of time trying to comprehend. If somebody sends me a four-paragraph case, I can have AI summarize. Here's the three bullet points, they have an access issue. Okay, I can go fix that. I can now move faster. Um, so we're gonna see um technology continue to be an enabler. I don't think I've ever seen a company that said, hey, we went uh implemented uh a lot of new technologies like Salesforce. And now no, we're gonna go back to paper in the advocacy. You know, no, nobody does that. Um we want to be able to move faster and we want to be able to move at a bigger scale, and that's what technology allows us to do. Salesforce is going to continue to uh innovate. Um, I think that's kind of one of the things that's kind of given them a leg up is that there is it's also a double-edged sword of the complexity's grown to be a lot more than what it was 10 years ago. Um, but so is the rest of the world. There's a lot more to solve for, and they're able, they're bleeding over into other areas to be able to compete against other platforms to where, hey, you know, you may not want to use all of service now. Maybe you want some of that functionality. You can build it out in Salesforce and eliminate those licenses. So being able to give you out of the box to give you something fast to be able to iterate upon, and then also the the power of a full development platform to be able to develop against. Um, you're only limited by um you know what problems you can think of that you need to solve for.

SPEAKER_02 57:55

Cool. Uh any particular innovation that um that you're really excited about, up and coming stuff?

SPEAKER_01 58:03

Uh I'm not gonna say AI because everybody says AI. Um innovation that's coming out.

SPEAKER_04 58:14

Um something that can be done better, uh, that you think there's a new product that's gonna enable something to be done better. It doesn't have to uh completely change the the playbook, right? I think sometimes in business it's about marginal gains. So uh if you can become X amount percent better, even if it's five percent, right? Is there anything uh you're particularly particularly excited about?

SPEAKER_01 58:39

Um I'm trying to think of there's so many thoughts here. The uh, you know, I like um I'm interested to see how data cloud really plays out, being able to get data on platform and off platform without bringing the data on the Salesforce together and being able to give that to the people who are closest to the to the clients and the customers. Um, I'm really interested to see the potential of you know how impactful is that. Um the the more information I can give to the problem who's the person trying to solve a problem should see problems get solved better and faster because of that. And it shortens that amount of time of being able to service our clients. The quicker we can give them value, the more they're gonna reward us with their business. And so that's something that uh I'm interested to see how that plays out and how we continue to grow on um you know leveraging data and analytics.

SPEAKER_04 59:39

Amazing. Well, um, with that, Chris, I think we're at a perfect uh place to be pleased to hear uh to take a breath and and uh wrap up. So um, Chris, uh thank you so much um for your for your time today. Um so many takeaways. Uh I think you know, we covered scaling teams, the importance of visibility on project progress. We talked about the uh the need to speak with business users, uh the importance of scrum teams, consolidating teams, uh some really uh good stuff around the teams and people aspect uh as well. So uh thank you again, Chris, uh, from both of us. We appreciate your time.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:21

Yes, thanks, Chris. It's been a pleasure.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:23

Uh yeah, thank you so much. Uh the last thing I will tell you is learning is the most important thing. If you aren't different in two years, you've made a mistake, especially when you're trying to grow. Um, because I couldn't do this job two years ago when I walked in here. And uh, we've definitely been able to accomplish a lot of great things along the way because we have a continuous learning mindset.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:46

Fantastic. Words of wisdom. Um, and and uh probably the best way to end the show. So um thanks again, Chris, uh, for our listeners. Uh, hope you enjoyed today's show. Um don't forget to subscribe to the CRM Success Show for more episodes featuring phenomenal leaders like Chris, who are shaping the future of not only Salesforce uh, but also in this case, uh Encino. Uh you can follow us on LinkedIn, YouTube, uh, Spotify, and Apple uh for the latest updates and exclusive content. Um thank you very much.