Defining the Nature of Your Salesforce Project

In this chapter, you will learn how to scope the desired business capabilities of your Salesforce project and determine the high-level hypothetical technical scope required to support those capabilities. These two elements together will be referred to as the nature of your Salesforce project.

You will be introduced to business process mapping and designing workshops for understanding current business processes and defining the business capabilities of your Salesforce solution. You will then be introduced to the Salesforce license types and learn how to determine the high-level hypothetical technical scope for your Salesforce solution.

We will continue to follow our scenario company, Packt Manufacturing Equipment (PME), and progress through the activities to define the nature of their Salesforce project.

After the nature of your project is defined, you’ll be ready to move on to the next activities in the pre-development...

Defining the capabilities to be supported by your Salesforce solution

In the previous chapter, you established your company’s situation and the overall purpose and vision for your Salesforce project. As illustrated in the following diagram, it is now time to get more specific and define the nature of your Salesforce project:

Figure 2.1 – Activities in the pre-development phase

Before jumping into defining the business capabilities for your Salesforce project, let’s first understand what business capabilities are and why they are important to define.

Understanding business capabilities

All companies and organizations have a number of business capabilities. But what are they really? A business capability is comprised of people with a skillset or area of competency who carry out work according to a business process, supported by one or more systems while having access to and the ability to create and update relevant data in order...

Determining the high-level technical scope of your Salesforce solution

Until now, we have not spent a lot of energy on Salesforce features. That will change now as we progress to define the high-level technical scope of your Salesforce solution.

You have defined the business capabilities to be supported by your Salesforce solution. Now it’s time to understand what hypothetical technical scope is needed to support the business capabilities. It is hypothetical at this stage because you will undoubtedly have many assumptions and uncertainties. As you progress through the chapters in the pre-development phase, the technical scope will become firmer until you finally contract with Salesforce.

The high-level technical scope

At this stage, determining the high-level hypothetical technical scope serves the following purposes:

• Being able to estimate the license cost of the solution
• Being able to request one or more potential implementation partners to provide an...

Iterating in the pre-development phase

Scoping a Salesforce project is a big and interesting exercise – one that always takes more than one iteration. As you progress through the following activities of the pre-development phase, you will return to review the capabilities to be supported by your Salesforce solution and the high-level technical scope. As you do, make sure you update your RAID log to capture decisions and assumptions. You are well on your way to making your Salesforce project take shape.

Summary

You have now established a hypothesis of what the business and technical scope should be for your Salesforce project – the nature of your Salesforce project. You started by learning how to gather input and determine the desired business capabilities. Then, you were introduced to the Salesforce product portfolio. Finally, you had a first attempt at defining the high-level technical scope of your Salesforce solution.

So far, you have created a vision for your Salesforce project – the why – as well as the nature of it – the what – and you are ready to move on to the next chapter of your Salesforce implementation: Chapter 3, Determining How to Deliver Your Salesforce Project. It is time to look at the best way to deliver your Salesforce project – the how.