With Salesforce, you have a powerful cloud-based platform to run and grow your business on a day-to-day basis. Salesforce is infinitely flexible and can be tailored to meet a wide variety of business needs, notably sales, marketing, and service. Salesforce should complement and integrate with the business applications you’ve already invested in (as long as they are providing value). This enables you to start automating your business and gaining real efficiencies. But do you know all the applications used in your business, how much you’re spending on them, or which systems are sharing data? Creating and qualifying an inventory of applications--the Application Portfolio--is a great way to make sure you’re not only getting the most out of your Salesforce platform, but you’re identifying technology opportunities and managing costs and risk for your entire business. Given that modern cloud-based platforms evolve rapidly, regularly updating your application portfolio and using it to plan strategically becomes critical.
With Salesforce, your current applications/platforms are updated with new features three times a year in Winter, Spring, and Summer. These moments in the lifecycle provide chances to increase the value of your portfolio. Comprehending exactly what stages your applications are in within their lifecycles will help keep your business moving forward. An application portfolio encourages the streamlining of applications to promote the best use of your investments. Through application lifecycle management, you can assess your application inventory and determine what works and what does not work to help you grow your business, as well as what improvements need to be made and when they should be implemented.
Assess Lifecycle Status
Applications and programs have lifecycles. Addressing the stages of each application’s lifecycle is an important step in prolonging and improving the benefits of an application. Is an application properly performing through evaluation and implementation? Is it maintaining, or is it approaching the end of its lifecycle and ready to be retired? Managing these transitions contributes to the efficiency of your application and program usage.
Measure Value
Do your applications still provide value to your business? You must consider how much each application costs to implement and maintain over the years and weigh that cost with application performance. Some of the costs to consider include licensing and maintenance, implementation costs, consulting and FTE labor, hosting and infrastructure, training and adoption, and more.
Measure Fitness
Along with value, application lifecycle management takes into consideration how affordable, maintainable, and customizable each application is, as well as the current condition.
Managing Change
The functionality of Salesforce matters, so managing the appropriate changes will require a reliable change management team, including a responsible leader for guidance. The team leader will create the best strategy and communicate your message well to your users. A governing body is also needed to translate objectives established by the team leader into actionable plans that accommodate the requirements of your stakeholders.
Establish Application Ownership
Your application portfolio is made of a list of assigned owners called application owners, often from the change management team. This list can be used to manage applications throughout their lifecycle. In contrast, data owners are responsible for underlying data being accessed through various applications. The application owners are responsible for reviewing and approving changes that affect applications/data they own.
Communication is Key
Changes in portfolio applications need to be well communicated to end-users. Consider setting up a knowledge base of how-to articles and simple communication channels you can use to send out release notes when changes are made. Make sure you have a support team in place, and systems to track and manage requests for help after go-live, like Salesforce Service Cloud Knowledge, Cases, and Chatter, or integrate your favorite in-house tools. With these systems in place, you’re ready to think about the training content needed for the roll-out of major new features or changes. Once features are updated and enhanced, properly using them to gain the most functionality and usage is vital to a smooth transition and progression of your business via Salesforce applications.
Do you have more questions about understanding your Application Portfolio? We’d love to answer them! Send us a message and we’ll reach out with an answer for you right away!
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