Communicating, Training, and Supporting to Drive Adoption

In this chapter, we will focus on preparing your change management plan template, as well as planning your roll-out activities in phases or waves. As part of this, you will reiterate what will change as your Salesforce solutions replace existing ways of working – and prepare your organizational enablement plan to manage the changes. We will introduce various training models as well as and what to consider when using each of them. Then, we’ll cover how to provide hypercare in the initial period after go-live and how and when to transition to production support operations. Next, we will discuss how to monitor and drive adoption. Finally, we will look at how you can begin to evaluate and compare the benefits achieved with your original business case.

You will learn to design a change management and training plan for your roll-out. Then, you will learn how to provide efficient hypercare support for users going live...

Planning, communicating, and managing change

The purpose of the following activities, in short, is to ensure that the business value you wish to achieve with your investment in Salesforce is unlocked, realized, and maximized.

Let’s get started!

Understanding the scale of change to come

In Chapter 3, Determining How to Deliver Your Salesforce Project, in the pre-development phase of your project, you identified the actors who would be affected by the change as a result of your Salesforce solution. A lot has happened since then. You have progressed through the pre-development and development phases, and many of the assumptions and hypothetical processes and solutions may have changed – to better fit your business needs.

What you should ideally have done throughout the development phase is work with a business change consultant to identify how the new solution and processes differ from current ways of working, and for whom.

Here are some of the typical stakeholders...

Providing hypercare and managing production support

The period after user training is key and fragile. As such, a heightened level of support is required to be able to quickly respond to questions and issues faced by end users. That phase is called hypercare – let’s dive into it!

Providing hypercare

Hypercare is a phase in your Salesforce project as much as it is a capability.

Let’s break the capability into its parts:

• The hypercare process: When your users begin working in Salesforce, they may get stuck, face issues, and require further assistance beyond the training and training materials you have provided. Be sure to communicate the process your users should follow to get help. It may be similar to the process you used for SIT and UAT, so use that as a starting point.
  • Depending on your setup and available resources, you need to determine what levels are involved in your hypercare process. Ask your end users to state the priority/severity when...

Monitoring and the driving adoption of your Salesforce solution

In parallel with providing hypercare and support, you should closely monitor and try to understand the adoption of your Salesforce solution.

As mentioned in point 4 in the previous section, you shouldn’t consider transitioning from hypercare to ongoing production support before you reach your adoption targets. Why not? If your solution isn’t adopted in the hypercare phase of your roll-out, how will you make sure it is adopted later and whose responsibility will it be? When your project enters the continuous improvement phase, the focus for many stakeholders will shift to new feature development, and for your roll-out/local deployment team to prepare for the next wave.

For these reasons, I would propose that you – as the one accountable for your Salesforce implementation – expand the scope of what hypercare entails, and when it may finish.

Let’s move beyond simple quantitative...

Summary

Having read this chapter – and created your own change management and roll-out plan – you have set your Salesforce project up for a successful initial go-live, as well as successful further roll-outs. You prepared and executed your organizational enablement plan to manage the scale of change to come. You determined your overall training plan and determined which methods of training you will offer your users. You have learned how to provide hypercare after go-live and when to transition to ongoing production support. Finally, you have learned how to monitor and drive adoption, and you began to evaluate how the benefits compare to those of your original business case for your Salesforce project.

In the next chapter, we’ll discuss typical issues you may encounter when rolling out your Salesforce solution, and how to mitigate and overcome them. You will also be provided with a checklist to evaluate the state of your Salesforce project in the roll-out phase...