Is this normal?
I work for a larger healthcare company in the north east. I was hired to have full architectural control of a departments Salesforce environment. Upon joining, leadership was new and we both found out that the development of the Salesforce organization is controlled by an internal team instead of an outside consultant. We were told that under no circumstances would I be able to have full admin access. We then had to have multiple meetings to finally get me a developer sandbox to understand how things work. I’ve now become a product owner/analyst role. I’ve been working to clearly define KPI’s and add the needed fields to Salesforce as well as required fields and tooltips. I was told that I need to go to the business analyst on the development team, have them submit a user story, then I sign off on it, then it goes to development, then QA, then UAT to test, then deployed. This is all fine with me but it takes a very long time to get things deployed.
A new field with no dependencies takes anywhere from 2-4 months to get deployed. Being able to create related records when a new person account is converted from a lead or created has taken 7 months to get to UAT. I came from a smaller company where we didn’t custom LWC and apex everything if we didn’t need to.
Is this development timeline normal in the industry?