The client

The OPCO AFDAS (Skills Operator) is an organization approved by the State in France, specializing in supporting the culture, creative industries, media, leisure, sports, and tourism sectors. Its main mission is to support the professional development of employees and businesses in these fields.

It funds the training of employees, freelancers, and independent artists, supports companies in managing their training projects, and promotes work-study and apprenticeships. Its role is to help develop skills within the creative industries.

Their needs

In the context of its IT system overhaul, AFDAS deployed Salesforce “MyA” for its internal users in January 2020 and Experience Cloud for its members, individuals, and service providers. MyA offers a large number of features, leading to specific developments that are difficult to maintain and recurring regressions during updates.

AFDAS wants to conduct a technical audit of “MyA” to identify the application’s technical issues. Specifically, AFDAS aims to improve its internal processes, reduce regressions with each bug fix release, revert to Salesforce standards, gain better visibility on the developments made, stabilize “MyA” by reducing regressions, have more stable code, improve productivity, and eliminate low-value tasks.

The Cloud Ambiance team was assigned to perform this audit.

Our recommandations

Following the various interviews scheduled at the beginning of the audit, several concerns were raised regarding the current state of the application. Here is a summary of the feedback:

  • Siloed work between teams
  • Long and inefficient release cycles
  • Regressions after each release
  • Lack of control in design choices
  • Lack of documentation on the developments made

Our recommendations are therefore focused on:

  1. Organization between the different teams: Representatives of each team should hold synchronization meetings as communication is essential to align teams with the same objectives.
  2. Implementation of release management: Environment management helps reduce regressions caused by deployment errors.
  3. Organizing workshops: It is important to challenge business requests to understand the core problem and work with all teams to find the most suitable and optimized solutions.
  4. Returning to standards: It is necessary to adopt Salesforce standards by using its out-of-the-box features and reducing specific developments.
  5. Adoption of the Agile Scrum methodology: It is crucial to implement this methodology across AFDAS teams to increase productivity, visibility, and improve interactions between team members.

Implémentation

Implementing the recommendations was not a simple task, especially regarding change management. Our teams contributed to the success of the following areas:

  1. Organizing and prioritizing the backlog of requests (bugs vs. evolutions)
  2. Better analysis of business needs
  3. Implementing shorter delivery cycles with more visibility
  4. Adoption of Jenkins and GitLab for release management
  5. Collaborative work between teams
  6. Technology monitoring in the service of innovation
  7. Adoption of Agile methodology
  8. Up-to-date documentation
  9. Productivity gains

 

Satisfied Users

Subscribers to the MyA Portal

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Member Satisfaction