CLIENT
INDUSTRY
Technology, media and telecommunications
FEATURING
Operating model transformation
~400
teams within BT standardized to a consistent work structure
200
employee resources freed up and redeployed to create capacity to take on additional business demand
100%
coverage across all BT job functions, enabling clarity of roles and clear alignment to business collaborators, leading to stronger delivery
Transparent, seamless collaboration deepened credibility and trust company-wide
SITUATION
Enhancing IT practices to match a customer-focused mindset
Salesforce proudly calls itself the customer company. From its origins as a cloud-based CRM that pioneered a SaaS business model, Salesforce has upheld customer trust as key to its success. As one of the first companies to offer a cloud-based version of an essential business service, Salesforce knew that transparency, communication and relationship building would help its early-adopter customers take a leap of faith in moving to cloud. Even as cloud-based solutions became the norm, the company succeeded — and expanded — by continuing to cultivate relationships while helping deliver consistent quality and offering the solutions its customers needed most. Today, Salesforce is known for technological innovation, software performance and a customer-centric mentality that helps drive everything from product development onward.
Imagining a BT for the Future
As Salesforce grew, the need to scale its BT function at an enterprise level naturally arose. The company successfully adapted and made changes as necessary for individual teams over time, but soon it became apparent that a more deliberate effort to scale could help advance its broader internal technology function even further. Under the leadership of a new CIO, Salesforce seized the opportunity to reimagine BT, applying the same innovation, rigor and customer focus that made the company a success. The “BT for the Future” initiative would reposition business technology at Salesforce to solve immediate problems, bring BT closer to the rest of the business and prepare it to scale for the future. In short, it would enable Salesforce to treat its internal “customers” more like a company does its external ones. Drawing on a longstanding relationship with PwC, Salesforce enlisted the firm’s help to assess BT's capabilities and identify opportunities to elevate its organizational practices, help deliver more value and assume a stronger role as a collaborator to the rest of the company.
To become a modern, industry-leading-practice operation, BT needed to think more holistically about its ways of working. For years, it operated via a project-based model, organizing teams based on job function and assembling them around available work as necessary. Though this model lent itself well to an activity-based metric of success, it made prioritizing requests and collaborating across different functional groups difficult. Inspired by the success of Salesforce’s engineering and products teams, BT realized that adopting a product-based model would enable it to be more agile and responsive. Rather than one-off projects that have finite end dates and pull in different members of different teams each time, the product-based operating model would help BT deliver continuous value through its products while aligning cross-functional teams on a more consistent basis.
SOLUTION
Shifting gears from projects to products for a productivity boost
Salesforce recognized that transitioning from its existing project-based operating model to a product-focused one would be no easy feat. Successful transformation would require clear targets, an integrated work plan and ongoing support from the leadership team. With help from PwC, it developed a “metro map,” plotting each phase of the transformation toward seven ideal state outcomes — improving security, increasing business intimacy, helping drive automation adoption, improving delivery and agility, running BT as a business, improving foundations and strengthening talent. To gauge progress toward its goals, BT performed quarterly check-ins, revisiting the metro map to reassess metrics on a leader scorecard and adjust priorities accordingly. This strategy proved key to achieving lasting transformation. Setting manageable steps for each sprint helped BT avoid planning too far into the future while regular retrospectives embedded a transformation mindset into its ways of working.
A ‘whole-company’ approach
BT’s overarching goal for the transformation went beyond improving effectiveness within its own organization — it wanted to enable Salesforce to accomplish more as a whole. By aligning its processes and team structure to improve core competencies, BT could position the company to make better use of internal resources and enable sustainable growth in the future. The team’s approach to overcoming shadow IT issues exemplified its “whole-company” strategy. After considering how to reclaim decentralized IT tasks from the rest of the business, BT decided to wait until it could deliver greater value than Salesforce could achieve by handling the work itself. By making strategic choices about when and how much of the work to take back, BT established a framework for how business-embedded IT could successfully drive creative value for the company.
Salesforce tasked PwC with evaluating its existing operating model, which centered around large, sometimes slow-moving projects. After a benchmarking analysis to understand how BT compared to industry peers, as well as a full capability assessment, PwC and Salesforce drafted recommendations for a new operating model that could improve IT performance and lay the groundwork for future growth. The new operating model shifted focus from extended projects to rapid, repeatable products aligned to business demand, allocating work to preassigned teams rather than building teams around the work. PwC also helped BT streamline its organization in alignment with its new operating model, mapping each employee to a specific job family, role and grade level.
Throughout the transition, BT nurtured a “one-team” mindset, emphasizing clear communication and cross-functional collaboration among teams. This mindset shift was crucial in helping employees adapt to major structural and procedural changes. To smooth the transition further, PwC worked with BT teams on how to apply the new blueprint, training them to adopt more agile processes and ways of working.
RESULTS
Stronger collaboration drives greater value
By transitioning to a product operating model and realigning its organizational structure to match, Salesforce BT successfully improved its operational efficiency and enabled the company to achieve more overall. Standardizing teams to a consistent work structure and clarifying individual roles and responsibilities increased accountability and improved communication. This strengthened trust, both within BT teams and with their internal Salesforce customers. The new team structure also made it easier to differentiate employees’ individual skill sets, driving specialization (and therefore efficiency) in product domains within BT. All this forged a new sense of business intimacy. The company gained a greater understanding of BT’s processes and value, and BT could contribute more meaningfully to enterprise strategy and decision-making. Most importantly, Salesforce BT was able to apply the company’s customer-first value system to its own work.
Making the most of internal resources
BT’s transformation efforts created positive downstream effects for the company as well. Adopting agile ways of working and closing gaps in communication enabled BT to collaborate more effectively and make more consistent, quality deliveries. As a result, Salesforce was able to take on more projects, focus on innovation and implement modern technologies like generative AI. The transformation positioned the company to respond faster to outages and other incidents. Enhanced IT capabilities enabled Salesforce to take better advantage of its own platform internally. A more strategic division between in-house resources and managed service providers (MSPs) drove cost savings for the company and increased its capacity to tackle business priorities. Take application maintenance, for example. By using an MSP, Salesforce could refocus more than 200 resources toward key areas like cyber, data, cloud migration and the responsible and transparent use of technology.
Looking ahead, Salesforce BT is embracing transformation as a perpetual process. With a new organizational structure, operating model and one-team mindset, BT for the Future can now push toward continuous improvement, maturing its processes and capabilities through modern technologies, AI and automation. The BT team’s success also lays a foundation for Salesforce to scale its operating model transformation further in the future, with the potential to apply the same mindset to other teams and business functions.
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“We pride ourselves on offering customers the highest caliber products and engineering. PwC helped us deliver the same standards of speed and consistency in our internal IT operations.”
“Every single person in BT invested in the transformation, not just the leaders. It was a collaborative, community-driven effort to drive continuous improvement.”
“The past 18 months have been truly transformative for BT. We’ve streamlined operations, provided visibility to key metrics and enhanced prioritization, delivering significantly more value. By optimizing roles and focusing on high-value efforts, we've identified substantial savings and reduced costs. These savings are being reinvested in innovative technologies to further enhance business effectiveness. Our strategic partnership with PwC has been pivotal in driving this growth and efficiency.”
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