Deploying Your Release and Migrating Data to Production

Following the building and testing of your Salesforce solution in the previous chapters, in this first chapter of Part 3, The Roll-Out Phase, of your Salesforce project, you will be guided through the key activities and milestones in the roll-out phase. Next, we will dive into some of the key considerations and practicalities of deploying your Salesforce solution, as well as how to make the most of user acceptance testing (UAT). Next, we will evaluate your preparedness for migrating your data to production and provide you with a final go-live checklist to verify you’ll be ready to go live after training your users.

By the end of the chapter, you will understand the key milestones, outcomes, and activities in the roll-out phase of your Salesforce project. You will gain insights and practical advice for performing system integration testing (SIT) and driving UAT. Finally, you will understand that planning and performing...

Overview of the roll-out phase of your Salesforce project

In this phase of your Salesforce project, the focus is on getting your initial solution and legacy data to production and getting users set up for success.

Let’s take a look at what you will be doing in this phase.

Key activities and milestones of the roll-out phase

The roll-out phase of your Salesforce project begins when you have completed building the first version – the initial release – of your Salesforce solution.

Historically, many organizations – and their implementation partners – have defined a successful roll-out to be when the solution is deployed to production, data is migrated, users have gone through training, logged in for the first time, and the number of new daily production support tickets drops below a predetermined threshold. Sounds familiar?

But to maximize value from your investment in Salesforce, you must go beyond that to define success in the following...

Deploying your Salesforce solution through environments

Salesforce deployments come in many forms, and their duration can span a few minutes to many hours or even days for heavily customized, old orgs with limited technical governance.

While what you deploy is unique to your organization and project, the steps for how you deploy your entire solution from one sandbox to another – and finally to production – at an abstract level are as follows:

• Plan deployment: There are two parts to planning a deployment:
  • Organization deployment planning: Make sure you have aligned the following key things with your stakeholders and project team members:
    • What you want to deploy
    • When you want to deploy
    • Who you expect to be part of the deployment, and what they are expected to do
    • Any development freeze periods have been communicated
  • Technical deployment planning: Determine and prepare the following items before starting your deployment:
    • Prepare a release artifact: Depending on your development...

Driving UAT of your solution

You have deployed your solution to the sandbox in which you intend to carry out UAT. Great!

UAT is one of the key milestones of a Salesforce project. If your acceptance testing team (or customers and partners) don’t accept the solution you are building, nothing else really matters.

Let’s see next what you need to prepare to plan for a successful UAT.

Planning for a successful UAT

To set yourself up for a successful UAT, you need a plan. Let’s look to see what it should contain:

• Lean meetings: These should be short meetings to share updates, and in some of them make decisions, though these are not meant for brainstorming or discussions:
  • UAT kickoff: Here, your project team introduces UAT to the acceptance testing team, including the duration, activities, processes, and outcomes of UAT
  • Daily check-in/check-out: These are quick status calls with your project manager (PM), product owner (PO), business analyst (BA), and...

Checking your data migration preparedness and signing off to go live

You are now in the final stages of the development phase. You have successfully deployed your Salesforce solution and executed SIT and UAT.

In this section, we are going to highlight the key practical considerations to evaluate whether you are really ready to start migrating data into your Salesforce production environment.

Evaluating your data migration preparedness

Before you embark on migrating your data to production, make sure you have prepared – and practiced – your data migration plan. It should have been done in the development phase.

Important note

If you haven’t prepared your data migration plan, you need to pause and check out the Preparing your data migration plan section in Chapter 7, Building and Testing Your Initial Release, and get cracking before proceeding.

Great, you have your data migration plan in place! This means you have determined how you will technically...

Summary

In this chapter, you have covered a lot of material. We began by guiding you through the key activities and milestones in the roll-out phase. Next, we covered the planning and steps for deploying your Salesforce solution through environments.

You learned how to perform SIT and UAT to make sure your solution works as intended from end to end and is accepted by representatives of your target end-users. Finally, we covered how to evaluate your preparedness for migrating your data to production and provided a checklist for going live.

Having deployed your Salesforce solution to production, you are now ready to train your end-users to set them up for success and to communicate with and support them as they learn to use your solution. All that and more to come in the next chapter of your Salesforce implementation.