Why Most Salesforce Org Split, Clone, and Merge Projects Fail
Salesforce org splits, clones, and merges are always mission critical projects. When companies are acquired, divested, or merged there will be an important timeline for events that must happen along with major financial investments at risk. If the Salesforce org split, clone, or merge project goes over budget or behind schedule, then there will be serious ramifications for all of the stakeholders involved in the business transaction.
The dirty little secret here is that most org split, clone, and merge projects end up as partial failures or outright disasters. The required transition might be imperfectly executed or in the worst case never completed. Both of these outcomes can threaten the business transaction through unanticipated costs, architectural problems, or a big delay in the business transaction timeline.
And it’s not for lack of trying. We have seen Salesforce GSI Partners throw massive manpower resources at these projects and charge mid six or low seven figure price tags for the work. These projects can take many months or even years to complete. The core issue is that the tangled web of metadata dependencies in an org are difficult to move. This is a logical problem. Hiring more developers doesn’t change that.
In our experience, neither the customer nor the GSI Partner fully appreciate the difficulty of creating a true metadata clone of a complex Salesforce environment. Instead of cloning an existing org, they end up building a new one, and this leads to massive testing and acceptance problems.
Metazoa publishes dedicated tooling to solve the org split, clone, and merge problem. We offer services to complete these projects, but as a software company, we would rather enable our SI partners or end customers. The Metazoa tooling can reduce manpower resources and project duration by 5X on average. More importantly, we can create true metadata clones. The broad categories of tooling we offer are below:
- Org Documentation — Document and compare all 300 Metadata Types across orgs
- Security Optimization — Map users to the new org with appropriate permissions
- Technical Debt — Remove unused assets before an org split or after an org merge
- Data Migration — Best of breed data migration for org split and merge scenarios
- Metadata Deployment — Best of breed release management for rapid metadata changes
- Artificial Intelligence — Prompt automation for org data/metadata transformation
A key technology that enables Metazoa tooling is our Impact Analysis API. We have a proprietary knowledge base on all 300 Metadata Types and the 1400+ dependencies between them. Our dependency information is orders of magnitude more complete and accurate than any other source in the Salesforce ecosystem. This capability allows Metazoa to create pure metadata clones of Salesforce orgs, and that enables dramatically better outcomes for any org split, clone, or merge project. Here are some helpful resources, below:
The Metazoa SI Partner Program:
Other Information for SI Partners:
https://www.metazoa.com/publications/si_program_roi_v2.pdf
https://www.metazoa.com/publications/winning_strategy_v2.pdf
Technical Papers for Org Split, Clone, and Merges:
https://www.metazoa.com/best-practices-salesforce-org-splits/
https://www.metazoa.com/best-practices-salesforce-org-mergers/
