Key ingredients for your Salesforce technology team, to help you extract value
To be able to react fast to the evolving business strategy, develop fast, and deliver scalable solutions fit to meet the business strategy, a combination of the right team + a well-defined delivery approach + rules of the road (to success) is critical. At the end of the day, businesses, particularly where systems are involved, want to focus more on new possibilities rather than having to deal with technical problems or technical debt.
The right team:
Check out Paulo Gomes' recent post CRM | The Game Changer 3.0 where he passionately talks about the right mix of roles required for building up a Salesforce tech team and why it's critical to any project success, including helping businesses get the max value.
Of course, not all businesses may have the budget available to build a team that size, but it's guaranteed to get you thinking if you have the right team in place and how you could fill the gaps.
For example,
◽️does your salesforce tech team operate with a vision in mind❓
◽️does your team have the required knowledge of best practices to avoid any costly mistakes❓
A well-defined delivery approach:
The fact that Salesforce does three releases each year with hundreds of new functionality, delivery solutions on the Salesforce platform can be very different from the traditional technologies, also due to the flexibility that comes with configuring & developing on the Salesforce platform. This also means you want to approach your Salesforce delivery in an agile way and want to deliver solutions more frequently.
This can be tricky when one wants to ensure what's being delivered is scalable and is not just for the sake of a speedy rollout. How can businesses manage this?
✅ Leverage the use of sandboxes and define your release cycle - this is the most critical step for businesses that want a smooth delivery for their solutions on the Salesforce platform
✅ Start by splitting your releases into Business as Usual (BAU) and Project releases
✅ Plan out your release schedule at least for a month in advance and communicate to the stakeholders so they can also plan accordingly when they come to you with new requirements
✅ Ensure the right team members are investing their time and effort in grooming and planning the releases
✅ Invest in the right tools that enable you to remove frictions that are likely to impact your delivery. There have been a lot of great developments recently in the Salesforce DevOps space to allow businesses to deploy smoothly and manage releases more efficiently
Rules of the road (to success):
Nothing like a team following a set of "operating principles" when configuring and developing on your Salesforce platform. If you don't have any currently, below are a few suggestions to get started.
✅ Embed a practice of mapping out the desired user stories with the business goal, whether it's for a BAU requirement or a requirement from within a specific project
❌ Do not start development/configuration until the acceptance criteria for your requirements have been agreed upon with your stakeholder/business users
✅ Ensure the right people are investing their time in reviewing the work completed before it is passed on to the QA team for testing. This step will significantly eliminate any re-work required later on if you run into any system performance issues or issues during regression tests
✅ Define technical guidelines for the team to follow, such as:
Maintaining a high level of completeness for the metadata by adding help text, description references of the requirements
Ensure the correct sandbox/environment is being by the team at the start of each sprint. This step can save a significant amount of time at the review stage
As a guideline, your release cycle could have a similar setup
So, what is stopping you today from adopting these best practices to make a start on the journey to optimizing your Salesforce instance?
To find out more about how Advisedly Optimize can help your business take the required steps to embed a culture of optimization and technical hygiene for your Salesforce platform, reach out to us and have a chat!
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