Talent Hub recently met with George Gemayel of Open Colleges to discuss how the Salesforce platform has assisted Australia’s leading Online training organisation with the huge growth they have seen. George gave us detailed insights into the way his team is structured, the culture of the business and future plans.
Tell me a little about your career before Open Colleges, your role as the Head of Enterprise Systems, the business and how you use Salesforce?
Like most people in IT, my career has spanned many different roles and technologies. I started as a malware hacker before moving into the more traditional roles such as software developer, architect and senior manager.
The two aspects of my career I enjoy the most is aligning technologies to meet the changing and growing needs of businesses and developing highly skilled and effective technical teams; which is exactly my role here at Open Colleges.
Open Colleges is the leading Australian Online training organisation with over 150 courses. We are a mature business that has grown from 30 staff to about 600 staff in 6 years. I head up the development and delivery of all enterprise systems at Open Colleges, specifically our student management system which is powered by Salesforce.
Salesforce at Open Colleges is leveraged as a platform, not a CRM, in fact CRM makes up about 10% of what Salesforce delivers for us. Almost every role and division with Open Colleges interacts with Salesforce including education advisors, student services, academic staff, course development teams, finance, compliance and marketing. To deliver a successful solution and to keep up with all the new business initiatives, we have invested heavily in a development team made of highly skilled admins and developers. Furthermore, this team is continually innovating looking at new technologies to drive more value out of our Salesforce investment, some recent examples include Marketing Cloud, Wave and Mulesoft.
You have been with the business for just over a year now so what attracted you to the Open Colleges originally?
Open Colleges is digital at its core, which is to say that cloud, social, mobile and analytics is part of our DNA. Most organisations biggest IT challenge is dealing with legacy systems, which is not something we need to deal with at Open Colleges.
The other attraction is the culture. The type of environment here is more of a Digital Media organisation that is engaging, collaborative and respectful of each other.
In the last year, what has been the biggest challenge for you in your role?
The biggest challenge for me was to improve the way that we managed change across the business. When I first came on board, the team was very reactive; Most of the day was spent putting our fires with very little thought into qualifying and prioritising requests.
This had a huge impact to the team, as they didn’t feel like they were achieving, innovating or progressing towards an end goal.
How did you overcome this challenge?
Over the course of 12 months, we continually implemented and optimised the way in which we operated. We:
- Implemented an agile/scrum development methodology, allowing developers to focus on specific tasks that have been qualified, estimated and prioritised.
- Nurtured a team environment that is competitive and consultative rather than a team of individuals.
- Ensured that every team member – both Administrators and Developers were in front of business stakeholders so that they could understand how the business operates which enables them to make the right decision for the solution.
This really improved my team’s confidence, their skill level and personal brand. This change alone empowered the team and made people a lot happier in their role.
- We identified Salesforce ‘champions’ across the business and made them our partners. Before we made this change we were trying to align with 450 users which was too big a task, where now we align with 8-10 power users who represent each business division.
- Implemented a steering group with the same Salesforce champions from the business. They continually work with us to prioritise the backlog of stories that we have. This has two benefits; firstly we are delegating prioritisation of stories back to the business. Secondly, the forum provides transparency into the product roadmap.
- Finally, we identified our team of Salesforce Administrators as the Product owners of our Salesforce instance. Typically it was Developers making the decisions on how the product should look and operate, but we flipped that on its head. Along with me, the Administrator decides what goes into production and approve/reject deliverables. Our Admins have a vision of how the product should look and operate and know what will cause support issues, so they are best placed to play the role of Product Owner. Rather than fighting fires, our Salesforce Administrators now spend a large percentage of their time innovating and making the product cooler.
How would you describe the culture within your team now?
We have a high performance culture where everything that we do is measured on a business outcome. You would typically hear us speaking in user stories as much as technical solutions on a given day. This change in focus has drastically improved the quality of work which resulted in our support queue dropping off.
Each team member is also self-managing. They own a set of tasks and see it to completion, with the support of the rest of the team. Each team member is not just cutting code, but delivering value to the business, which gives a great sense of achievement.
You are very passionate about what your team achieves at Open Colleges so what is it that you feel you and the team do particularly well?
My team has a real passion to innovate, try new things and to learn. Collaboration between the team is exceptional and we leverage each other’s strengths and help each other in areas of weakness. Teach and learn is a major part of our team culture.
What is the next challenge for you to overcome?
Our Salesforce solution was a fantastic fit for where we were as a business two years ago. However since then we have continued to see huge growth in our core business while diversifying into new markets and regions, so our next challenge is to ensure the product continues to be fit for purpose in relation to scalability, robustness and performance.
Therefore our big focus now is maturing our coding patterns, implementing best practice in application integration, UI/UX and Data Integrity. Taking the solution to the next level will be challenging but also very exciting for the team.
As your team has grown considerably in the last year, what has been most important to you when looking for new hires?
We have a team first approach so anyone coming into the team not only needs the right skills, but also has to fit culturally in the team. We don’t just hire a gun Developer if they don’t bring the specific skills required to complement our existing Developers.
Any hire needs to be a self-starter, highly driven and able to keep up with the teams pace. Our focus is on collaboration within the team and with the business, so any new hire will need to be comfortable in those situations.
What is the vision for your team over the next few years?
We are still on the journey we started 14 months ago. We will continue to optimise our development process, while maturing our technologies and products. Our Salesforce instance is our ERP and is business critical, so it is important we further develop the product and our practices to an enterprise grade.
We will also continue to introduce new technologies to complement our Salesforce solution which opens up opportunity for individuals to develop themselves further outside of Salesforce, specifically in key areas such as big data and application integration.
How has Salesforce enabled the business to keep achieving the growth and results that it has been?
Open Colleges is a fast paced, agile business so we need a platform that allows us to build and extend quickly. Having no infrastructure to manage is a huge advantage, but more so is the power and flexibility the Force.com platform provides. We are not limited to what is ‘out of the box’ with Salesforce and so customisation, through configuration and coding, has been key to our success. As a benchmark, our Salesforce instance is about 80% customised.
What opportunities for progression and learning can new team members expect when they join your team?
At Open colleges we rely very little on Salesforce partners, instead we prefer to develop the team and own our IP. So new members can expect plenty of support as they begin to understand the complexities of our system.
There are always ongoing projects across business divisions, so the opportunity to develop function specific skills are always available. E.g CRM, finance/accounting, data and insights, etc.
When it comes to progression, each team member is free and encouraged to develop themselves and there are plenty of opportunity on offer across support, admin, development, UI, change/project management and people management; and that is just in Technology and Systems. More opportunities exist across the business.
What would you like to see more of from the Salesforce ecosystem?
Every business using Salesforce faces similar challenges and some are doing really great things, so collaborating on strategy with other managers of Salesforce teams would be extremely beneficial.
I also think there need to be a shake up in the candidate pool as the skill level varies too much and having the certifications just isn’t enough.