The way how Salesforce features are handled by your organizational team is very important in order to maximize the benefits of Salesforce adoption. There are many things to take care of during Salesforce implementation and management. We may frequently hear people asking why there is 80% of the specific code on the Salesforce Platform rather than the 80% of the standard.
So, the objective of this article is for the organizations to understand the proper governance of Salesforce. Let’s explore further.
Salesforce governance tips
- Be agile in the true sense.
If you talk to any Salesforce consultant or go through the speeches of Marc Benioff himself, one may hear the term “agile” in every other sentence. We should admit the fact that Salesforce is always an agile approach, and it could be one of the greatest platforms you may have ever worked with an agile approach. With Salesforce, you may first stop the Waterfall style and ancient V Model.
- Don’t bet, but to estimate
Salesforce isn’t gambling to work this way or that way. There is no need for you to bet on building your products. If you want to get it true to the exact specifications, then you could finally get a fair 80% specific code and handle all governance issues coming packed with it.
- Continuous amelioration and not TPAM
Salesforce isn’t yet another customer relationship management platform. With its latest offering, Salesforce comes as an end-to-end Platform As A Service (PAAS) application. Many companies don’t understand or imaging as to how they can speed up their app development by moving on to Salesforce without bearing any extra cost. Some add-on benefits the Salesforce application developers have are:
- Working on Salesforce means custom creation of apps. For the users, it is an opportunity to effectively merge projects and then run it in a true team environment
- This approach will help lower technical debts by keeping the developers responsible for the correction of bugs and by enabling more quality.
- Help increase the loyalty of team members by diversifying tasks and by making delegation much easier.
- Sharing an appropriate product vision than keeping a project vision, which helps to bring all stakeholders together for better business purposes.
Next, let’s explore a typical organization structure to be adopted in the case of Salesforce administration. In fact, the roles and profiles for any specific business must be made in a customized manner based on the project size. In this, it is possible that a single person can handle multiple roles. Let’s further explore an organizational structure followed by Flosum.com in many client projects.
- PO or Salesforce Product Owner – This person is the customers’ and stakeholders’ voice. PO is also is accountable to ensure that the team can deliver maximum value to the business. PO makes new stories and releases them by prioritizing those based on the conditions and dependencies if any.
- SM or Scrum Master – This is actually some form of a facilitator who is responsible for removing an obstacle to strengthening the team can deliver results to meet the product goals and deliverables. In any typical project management environment, team leads and project managers may also act as a bugger between teams.
- Team – This is the team known in the SCRUM framework. The team is responsible for delivering many features at each stretch. The team actually consists of 3 to 9 members who take up the work of analyzing, designing, development, testing, etc. Usually, these development teams are well-organized and also cross-functional, which enable the team to implement many new features.
- Design authority – This is a very critical aspect of making sure that every functionality is built with the standard features of Salesforce. Design Authority is considered as the cornerstone and a solid basis for Salesforce operations. Design authority is also called a Center of Excellence.
- Support – A support team that will take care of all the requests, discrepancies, and bugs to be fixed, etc.
- Using all standards functionalities – It is important to ensure the use of standard functionalities of Salesforce than building from scratch. However, you may not find all such features as standard out there to fit into the exact need of the business. So, APEX coding may be required to achieve this, which a developer needs to sit and do.
Along with these, you should also define the architecture along with all processes, interfaces, and workflows between the components. Also, define development rules and test rules the team should follow. Governance rules also needed to be defined as to who all call do what all under which environment and how the support team gets incorporated in a bigger picture.
Structure of Salesforce support team
Defining the size of the support team needs to be done based on the number of users. Generally, there is a four-level support structure followed by practice as:
Level 0 – This will take care of all the requests from the users, which could be documented and processed easily. Say, for example, additional users or deactivating, etc. If an organization already has the base level support by default, it could be set as Salesforce level 0 also.
Level 1 – This is the support level offered by Salesforce administrators.
Level 2 – A level set one or more Salesforce consultants. They need to be technical experts in order to analyze the functional requests and testing related bug requests.
Level 3 – This level is ideally handled by Salesforce Team. This is not an explicit schema, but many times Design Authority must be involved in correcting complex bugs.
However, based on the size of the organization and the size of projects handled, multiple support levels can be handled by the same members themselves. For example, a good administrator may be able to handle levels 0, 1, and 2 if the number of users is limited in an organization. However, you should be very careful with level 2, where the administrator needs to work in close association with the Design Authority.
By following these standard practices, it becomes easier for organizations to turn your IT into pure business.
Guest article written by: Sujain Thomas is a writer and SEO expert. Nowadays Sujain manages and writes for Flosum.com. Her primary focus is on “Salesforce DX”. She is responsible for building content that helps IT professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.
Really helpful and clear written step by step guide. It really helped me out.
Thank You