90-Day Salesforce Recovery for Global Fashion Retailer

Situation

A global fashion retailer with €800M in annual revenue had been attempting a Salesforce Sales Cloud deployment for 18 months. The original go-live date was 14 months prior. The project had consumed €2.4M in SI fees against an original budget of €900K. The current implementation partner had billed 40% more in “scope change” fees than the original contract value, yet delivery remained incomplete.

The business was operating under significant operational impact. The sales team was managing pipeline in Excel because the Salesforce deployment wasn’t trusted — too many data errors, too many performance issues. Management had lost confidence in both the project and the implementing partner. The Salesforce investment was being questioned at board level.

The relationship with the SI had broken down completely. Escalations to the SI’s account management had produced SLAs and apologies but no delivery. The client had served legal notice to the SI. The engagement had transitioned from a technology project to a legal dispute, with the SI protecting their position rather than delivering.

The client needed an independent architect to assess the damage, determine what could be salvaged, and deliver the remaining requirements against a hard 90-day deadline set by the incoming CFO.

Diagnosis

The first two weeks were entirely diagnostic. No changes were made to the org or the project plan until the full picture was clear.

Technical Assessment

The current org state was documented against the original requirements specification. Of the 87 functional requirements in the original scope, 34 were fully delivered, 28 were partially delivered (functional but incomplete), and 25 were not started. The 34 “fully delivered” requirements included 11 that were delivered with known defects that the SI had logged as “backlog items” — effectively delivered on paper but broken in practice.

The data model had fundamental architectural problems. The Account hierarchy had been modeled incorrectly for the client’s B2B wholesale structure, creating a constraint that prevented multi-territory account ownership. The lead conversion process had been customized in a way that created data integrity issues on every conversion. Record-Triggered Flows had been written without governor limit considerations, causing bulk operation failures. Test coverage was 42% — well below the 75% Salesforce requires and the 80% that production workloads require.

Process and Governance Assessment

The project had no proper change control. Requirements changes were agreed verbally with the SI project manager, never formally documented, and often interpreted differently by client and SI. The “scope change” fees represented legitimate additional work in some cases and SI mistakes in others — but without formal change orders, there was no way to adjudicate.

There was no UAT process. The client had accepted deliverables based on SI-run demos, without a structured user acceptance test against written test cases. Users had not been involved in any testing until after each release — meaning defects were discovered in production rather than in testing.

Salvage Assessment

Of the 28 partially delivered requirements, 19 could be completed with targeted development work. The 9 remaining had been built using architecturally wrong approaches and needed to be rebuilt rather than completed. The 25 unstarted requirements were all achievable within 90 days given the right team and methodology.

The data model issues needed architectural fixes before the remaining requirements could be built on top — otherwise we’d be adding requirements on a broken foundation.

Action

Week 1-2: Architecture Repair

The Account hierarchy model was redesigned. Existing Account records were migrated to the corrected structure using a Batch Apex process with full before/after reconciliation. The lead conversion defect was diagnosed, root-caused to a trigger conflict with a Flow, and resolved. All Record-Triggered Flows were audited, refactored for governor limit safety, and re-tested against bulk data scenarios.

A test suite was built from scratch: 340 test methods covering all custom Apex, achieving 84% coverage. This was non-negotiable before any new development.

Week 3-8: Delivery Sprint

Requirements were re-prioritized against business impact: revenue-affecting functionality first, operational efficiency second, reporting last. A two-week sprint cycle was established with formal sprint planning, daily standups, and sprint reviews with business stakeholders as the acceptance mechanism.

The 19 completable partial requirements were finished in sprints 1-2. The 9 architectural rebuilds were executed in sprints 2-4. The 25 unstarted requirements were delivered in sprints 3-6, with weekly demonstrations to the business confirming acceptance before moving forward.

Every requirement had a written acceptance criteria document, created by the business owner and signed off before development started. Every completed item was tested by the business using that criteria before being marked as done. This eliminated the ambiguity that had allowed the SI to claim delivery on requirements the client didn’t accept.

Week 9-12: Hardening and Launch

Performance testing against projected transaction volumes identified three slow queries and one batch process that would fail at scale. All were optimized before go-live. A parallel run period allowed the sales team to use Salesforce alongside their existing Excel process, building confidence before the Excel process was formally retired.

User adoption training was delivered in the final two weeks. Unlike the SI’s approach of training users on how the system worked, training was delivered as “here’s how you do your job using Salesforce” — role-specific, workflow-based, with job aids that survived beyond the training sessions.

Result

All 87 requirements were delivered to production within 90 days, including the 25 that had never been started when the engagement began. The sales team migrated fully from Excel to Salesforce within three weeks of go-live, with no critical issues in the first 30 days of production operation.

The architectural foundation — rebuilt account hierarchy, clean data model, governor-limit-safe automation, and 84% test coverage — gave the business a platform they could build on rather than one they had to work around.

The CFO deadline was met. The legal dispute with the original SI was resolved: the client’s legal position was strengthened by the technical assessment documentation, which provided an objective record of what had and hadn’t been delivered. The settlement negotiation concluded favorably for the client.

More importantly, the organization recovered their confidence in Salesforce as a platform. The 18-month stall had created genuine skepticism at board level about whether Salesforce could work for the business. A functioning, adopted deployment — with a roadmap for expanding to Service Cloud and eventually Data Cloud — rebuilt that confidence.

Approach: Architecture assessment and repair, sprint-based delivery methodology, formal change control, user-driven acceptance testing, performance testing and optimization