Change management is a skill that is essential because Salesforce is a tool that makes it easy to make changes throughout your organization. You could argue that what makes change management so critical for Salesforce customers is that it is too easy to make changes in Salesforce. This is because Salesforce functions and data are so interconnected and interdependent that, without a change management process, there will be unintended consequences. That is, you roll out something awesome for one stakeholder and break something entirely different for another stakeholder.
The key is to understand how to deploy Salesforce changes that minimize the risk of something breaking while still solving the problem that needs to be solved. A core tenet for initial deployments is “keep it simple.” You can always add features and processes after the application is live but it is much harder to track down everything that is broken if lots of things fall apart at once.
Remember, it is impossible to incorporate every change request into your deployment – the level of effort may be too great or the request may not align with your ultimate business goals. When the steering committee meets to determine which change requests and Salesforce seasonal release features will be implemented, you need to have a strategy to determine the level of effort required. Once you have a list of enhancement ideas, determine the scope and impact of each idea. By defining the overall impact, the change management group and sponsor can easily prioritize which enhancements to implement, which to target for a later date, and which to reject.
Let’s take a look at what we mean by scope and impact.
Scope Definitions
Fix: Something is not working as expected; a bug.
Change: Nothing is broken, but a change in functionality is required.
Project: A major new feature or capability.
Impact Definitions
Small: One person or a small team is affected; workarounds available.
Medium: Multiple users or teams affected; workarounds available but costly.
Large: Multiple users or teams affected; workarounds not available or substantial training/adoption efforts required.
You can add these definitions to a matrix to better map out which enhancements need to be approved and which do not. For example, an enhancement that is a “small fix” would be an automatic approval while one that is a “large project” would need approval by the sponsor and steering committee.
For global or cross-functional deployments, it’s critical to align processes between functional areas. These processes should be reviewed by the change management group to avoid negatively affecting other functional areas. This step also provides an excellent opportunity to engage with your users. It’s a good idea to scope out the proposed features with a specific use case in mind and to shadow your users’ day-to-day routines to predict the effects of any changes.
Salesforce is a powerful tool that unites many of your organization’s functional teams in one piece of software. It helps you enact changes that benefit your customers, but those changes can sometimes hamstring your teams if not managed properly. Taking changes slowly and rolling them out with a defined process can help you and your teams continue to use Salesforce as the efficient, effective, and powerful tool that it is.
Comentários