Best Practices of Salesforce Change Management Methodology

9 Best Practices of Salesforce Change Management Methodology

Implementing changes in Salesforce is a strain for an organization. A good change management plan seems hard but to avoid change pain it is good to follow the best practices. Irrational change management leads to a number of alterations. A well-defined change management program is all about improvement. It demands the continuous yet effective change for sustainable use.

Let’s take a large UK-based company selling automobiles to customers as an example. Each sales team is managed by a sales manager that reports to a sales director. They utilize Salesforce products (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Community Cloud) and based on needs prefer to enhance and tune the Salesforce solution with the support of an outsource Salesforce development company.

Below are discussed the vitalness and importance of each phase of Salesforce Change Management which will share you the knowledge why it is the best practices to not to skip any of the phases -

  1. Plan a Strategy: To overcome the situation, a systematically defined plan should be created for the clear vision of the goal and the phases of implementation of the Salesforce solution. To create the strategy and work upon the asked for change request - management group is also called to look after the strategy implementation. Building a strategy is a method to invoke a  requisite modification or enhancement of the required plan.
  2. Involve an Experienced Leader: A leader is someone who demonstrates what's possible and have the learning about the feasibility and vision about the challenges to be faced while executing the minor to the major changes. To execute the change management workflow in a smooth manner it is recommended to have a good planning strategy and to allocate the resources based on the expertise and skill set required - this directly helps to fulfill the provided timelines. To maintain the records of the work execution and the future updates, the leaders usually prefer to have a software system that maintained the track of changes.
  3. Understanding the Perception of Change: It is good to customize the product or the software system to meet the requirements of the business - until and unless the changes are feasible to the system. For the Salesforce integrated solution, it is worthy to use Salesforce Chatter for Customer Relationship Management as an enterprise collaboration and networking platform. Salesforce Chatter is a platform that connects and engage employees resulting in driving more productivity, connect product teams where they can review feedback from customers on programs, products, and campaigns collectively and even the team can share knowledge, information and file right from the same platform.Using it, the salesperson vote for the idea about team sales, pinning it to the top of the requests list, which let the team priorities clearly for the current and future execution. Also, the leader responds to the ideas, commenting on the feedback or queries from the same platform. There may be other platforms too that fulfills the team and client purpose but for the Salesforce Development, it is preferable to use Salesforce Chatter.
  4. Defining the Change scope: Having considered the change requests and getting ideas related to it, the Salesforce developer team can now formulate strategies for the provided change requests list. Then the change leader looking to the scope and deciding the inter-dependencies roll up the change requests to the Opportunity team. The Change Leader synchronizes the process flow by bifurcating the timely deliveries and updates into each sprints.  On the basis of the suggested ideas, one can formulate their own layouts. With the balanced team and leader partnership and support, the impacts and plan can make out for the effective outputs.
  5. Prioritizing the CR: In the series of provided tasks it is good if it is prioritize to avoid the late deliveries and negative comments for the clients. Hence prioritizing the workload is much important for strategic implementation. There arise a situation for any team member to face difficulty in prioritizing their tasks, so in any software development company either. Amending every request and idea is just not feasible in the single shot. That’s why defining the overall impact is important as it helps the change executive group and leader to decide which enhancements to implement at first and to know that where this changes will have their effect, which to target for a later date, and which to keep it after executing the initial phase of the sprint.
  6. Executing and Testing: After prioritizing the task, the team integrates the assigned changes in the system, but it is not always necessary that the execution takes the same time as mentioned - in case of any issues it needs to smartly handled. Even there occurs at times a situation that runtime the change request gets revised which needs to be handled smartly.Summing up all the pluses and minuses of the development phase it is now the time to move for quality assurance - Testing. In the testing, the tester and QC performs the unit testing and automated testing to monitor various aspects of dealing with the system and creates the bug list. Viewing the bug list, developers revamp the issues and the process continuous unless the solution is up to the mark.
  7. Training & Knowledge Sharing: With the modification in the existing system and after testing it to assure the quality of the enhancement, it is good that the team get proper training by a training specialist regarding the functionality update and the way it is to be used by the end-users.  A training specialist from the external support provider also gives the user's release notes, user manual and online training materials which helps to easily get through the changes.
  8. Deploying & Delivering: At this stage, the Salesforce developer from the external support provider company transfers these changes with Change Sets, which helps to streamline changes deployment. After successfully deploying the solution is delivered for the use and the end users of the client eventually get used to the updates.
  9. Follow-Up & Support: After all the necessary procedures of deploying changes and training plus the quality check have been performed, the members of the Salesforce change management group should evaluate the outcomes and think over some improvements to apply down the side for the future enhancements. Reports for tracking change progress show that the process of change went smoothly or with a number of roadblocks. With this collective information of all the above phases and the workflow sprints, the change leader calls up for a meeting with the group to estimate whether the changes were successful or not?

Follow up also includes the maintenance of the upgraded products and providing the support to the client at times of needs and monitoring on equal time duration the condition of the software.

End of the Line

Salesforce changes implementation is never a late plan, it’s a strategy to create ahead of the game and continue right up to the post-launch phase. Salesforce integration is often related to applications that help organizations to achieve the  greater levels of operational consistency, efficiency, and quality.

Even when the changes are minor and don’t require extensive transformation, following a strategy is immensely important for the success of the change project and painless system operations with the minimized potential of the unplanned risks.

Article Resource: This article is originally published on https://www.tatvasoft.co.uk/

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