What this book covers
Chapter 1, Creating a Vision for Your Salesforce Project, begins with an introduction to the lifecycle of Salesforce implementations and gives you an overview of the pre-development phase of a Salesforce project. It then dives into strategy analysis and methods to help you understand your company’s imperative for change. This leads you to be able to define the vision for your salesforce project – your why.
Chapter 2, Defining the Nature of Your Salesforce Project, takes you through the activities you will be carrying out when defining the scope of your Salesforce project. We will also look at how you can – at this early stage – begin to consider how that translates to a high-level technical scope for your Salesforce solution and, critically, what technical enablers should typically be considered in it. This will allow you to define the what.
Chapter 3, Determining How to Deliver Your Salesforce Project, explores the topics of delivery methodology, change management, and governance. You will learn about what aspects to consider when deciding the right delivery methodology for your project, and how to distinguish between projects and programs. We’ll also discuss the advantages and disadvantages of various approaches for project phasing. We’ll cover what changes typically result from a Salesforce project, and what you should do to manage it. Lastly, we’ll guide you in laying the foundation for your overall Salesforce governance – your Salesforce Center of Excellence. The chapter enables you to answer the how of your Salesforce project.
Chapter 4, Securing Funding and Engaging with Salesforce and Implementation Partners, covers the financial aspect of a Salesforce project, along with engaging with external parties. You’ll learn how to create a business case based on business objectives and KPIs aligned with the vision for your Salesforce project. We’ll cover both the revenue-driving and efficiency/cost-saving impacts of your Salesforce project and program. You’ll be able to create and present your business case including the payback time and return on investment for your Salesforce project. Next, we’ll cover how you can engage with Salesforce to request a quote and be further inspired. Lastly, we’ll cover engaging and contracting with an implementation partner, and what to look for when choosing one. This chapter allows you to answer how much your Salesforce project or program will cost – and how much your organization stand to gain from it.
Chapter 5, Common Issues to Avoid in the Pre-Development Phase, introduces issues and root cause analysis. We will deep-dive into common issues faced in the pre-development phase of a Salesforce project and offer strategies for mitigation and prevention. Finally, we will go through a summarized checklist for the key activities you should have covered in the pre-development phase – enabling you to evaluate the state of your Salesforce project.
Chapter 6, Detailing the Scope and Design of Your Initial Release, begins by providing an overview of the development phase of your Salesforce project. In the chapter, we cover the activities and deliverables associated with detailing the scope of your Salesforce project. We cover the key architecture artifacts you should understand and have created for your Salesforce project. We also discuss levels of solution design and how much effort to put into creating it upfront before commencing development. We also cover aspects to consider when evaluating user story solution designs.
Chapter 7, Building and Testing Your Initial Release, covers the intricacies of getting the development of your Salesforce project off to a great start –through to completion. We explore the roles and responsibilities of your team members, how to plan your build phase, and considerations for setting up your Salesforce development model and testing environments. We go through the development process and highlight the mechanisms you should implement to govern your Salesforce project in the development phase. We also discuss the steps to take when preparing your data migration plan.
Chapter 8, Common Issues to Avoid in the Development Phase, presents common issues in the development phase of a Salesforce project and offers strategies for mitigation and prevention. Finally, we go through a summarized development phase checklist, enabling you to evaluate the state of your Salesforce project.
Chapter 9, Deploying Your Release and Migrating Data to Production, gives you an overview of the roll-out phase of a Salesforce project. We go through the practicalities of deploying your Salesforce solution through environments and how to drive user acceptance testing. Finally, we cover how to determine your preparedness ahead of data migration and signing off to go live.
Chapter 10, Communicating, Training, and Supporting to Drive Adoption, covers the critical activities for planning, communicating, and managing change. We’ll discuss and provide templates for phasing your rollout, as well as different ways to deliver training. We’ll look at how you should provide hyper care and when you can safely transition to ongoing production support. We’ll explore ways in which you should be monitoring and driving the adoption of your Salesforce solution to maximize the value derived from your investment.
Chapter 11, Common Issues to Avoid in the Roll-Out Phase, presents common issues in the roll-out phase of a Salesforce project and offers strategies for mitigation and prevention. We also go through a summarized checklist for the roll-out phase, enabling you to evaluate the state of your Salesforce project.
Chapter 12, Evolving Your Salesforce Org and DevOps Capabilities, begins by providing an overview of the continuous improvement phase of your Salesforce program. We explore the concept of a product organization and why you should aspire to transform your organization to become one. We’ll describe how you can implement suitable governance for your Salesforce program and platform through an updated Salesforce CoE and core roles in it. Lastly, we’ll dive into Salesforce DevOps and explore ways in which you can evolve your Salesforce DevOps capabilities to deliver greater value for your users and organization.
Chapter 13, Managing Your Salesforce Data to Harvest the Fruits of Customer 360, covers the important domain of data management and governance. We’ll go through fundamental concepts such as data categories, the data lifecycle, and dimensions of data quality. We’ll show you how you can govern, monitor, and improve the quality of your Salesforce data. We then guide you through an assessment of your own analytics initiatives and describe how you can consider leveraging your Customer 360 data to maximize the return on your Salesforce investments.
Chapter 14, Common Issues to Avoid in the Continuous Improvement Phase, presents common issues typically faced in the continuous improvement phase of a Salesforce program and offers strategies for mitigation and prevention. We also go through a checklist of what you should do when initially entering the continuous improvement phase, as well as what you should continually be doing to further unlock value for your users and organization.
