Follow the Paper Trail: Why Dive into the Internal Structure of an SFCC Tech Team

Take a microscope and apply it to any business and you’ll discover — much like drifting snowflakes settling on the ground — they are all unique when it comes to their processes.

This may be reasoned due to the blending of pre-set structures that are then expanded with spontaneous measures that were needed after running into specific problems of an individual business. And because each business is run differently, these spontaneous measures can be highly specific.

The documentation of these processes is particularly of interest if you are searching for a dev team to create and manage your next Salesforce Commerce Cloud installation. Why? Because during your search, these process documents unlock the view of the internal culture of a company, and reveal the cogs and machinery that lie underneath the polished surface.

There is a balance to be struck between overburdening internal processes and its other extreme of lacking even the most basic internal processes (like who do you report to if X happens?). Working within an environment that is heavy-handed with processes risks stagnating into a monstrous, slow-moving bureaucratic machine.

Measuring the right balance is not an exact science tooled with mathematics. You can’t simply divide company size by your current number of processes to calculate how close you are to a golden number (if only it were so simple).

The challenge for smaller and particularly younger companies — who hit the ground running and do great work — is that they begin life without many processes, and as they begin to take on more clients and grow, they naturally evolve into a big business with stacks of processes.

What this means for your business, who is on the lookout for a SF Commerce Cloud dev team, is deeply personal. Your objectives will be specifically attuned to your needs; you want the right partner for you. Evaluating a team’s processes (or lack thereof) will not reveal an automatic good or bad score. Perhaps a partner with slightly more processes is the right fit for you — if you want the assurance of each decision moving through a structured ladder of authorization; or a team with few processes in place may be more compatible — if you feel that will streamline and quicken the project.

The path most often taken is to choose a mid-sized tech team who will have all basic processes covered, but don’t stray towards creating a burdening bureaucracy. And because any process is documented, it is as easy as asking the team for an example of their internal working. Of course, sensitive documents aside, a serious business should be more than happy with this request to share relevant information. And if they refuse to be transparent about it, consider it a yellow card.

Once these docs are in your hands — or on your laptop screens — you can dig in and access whether their internal processes align with your needs, and whether they are the best fit for you and your company goals.

PS: UV is one of the world’s leading Salesforce Commerce Cloud (Demandware) tech teams. Contact us to see how we can work together.