A change management plan in Salesforce involves a specific set of actions to ensure a smooth transition between an organization’s goals, processes, and technologies while staying connected with strategic objectives.
Every industry can benefit from Salesforce change management, especially those facing new trends (such as rising competition, changes in regulations, or disruptions in supply chains). As an example, let’s examine how a typical Salesforce org can implement change management processes.
How Salesforce Change Management Is Doing
In Salesforce’s opinion, only 12% of corporate transformation initiatives are successful, which shows an unwillingness and inability to pursue change. Consequently, today’s competitive business landscape must optimize change management. With so many opportunities to make incremental changes in CRM, all you need is to have a qualified Salesforce implementation partner and a scalable change management plan.
- Understand the Need for Change
You may need to make changes to Salesforce for a variety of reasons. It can range from infrastructure addition to problem-solving.
No matter what the need is, you must analyze and measure its scale before implementing any changes.
Does this change require a major shift in operations, or will it be simple to accomplish? First, you must understand the different kinds of Salesforce changes you may have to make in order to determine what changes you need.
- Transformational Change: Revising your company’s IT infrastructure.
- User-Centric Change: Both changing the responsibilities of employees, and adding new team members comes under people-centric changes.
- Structural Change: Mergers, departmental changes, and leadership changes are examples.
- Remedial Change: Rapidly changing times are a typical example and will need on-demand development assistance.
A SMART approach to defining change goals
Specific:
➯ Communicate the need for change to employees. It may be difficult to convince some employees that this structural change was necessary at first, as they may be onboarded into new roles and responsibilities.
Measurable:
➯ It is important to present facts and figures on why structural change is important despite employees’ discomfort with the proposed change. Because of previous leadership and individual roles and responsibilities, you can show the performance of business units in the previous quarter.
Achievable:
➯ The change will increase work productivity if everyone is made aware of it. It will only be possible if everyone agrees. Describe how the changes in the workflow will streamline work execution to employees.
Relevant:
➯ Both employees and customers must understand why the change is relevant. It is only through changes in leadership and roles that we can move forward.
Time-Bound:
➯ It is important to implement structural changes within a specific timeframe. Implementing Salesforce changes in a time-bound manner can be helped by onboarding a development team with profound Salesforce knowledge.
- Define the Scope Change
➯ Tech-Architects, Project Managers, Developers, Consultants, and Admins should be assigned change requests by experienced leaders based on their skill sets. Meetings will discuss project goals, scope, tactics, roles, and responsibilities, etc.
➯ Communication on the go can be improved with the use of private channels such as Slack, which allows teams to share feedback and promptly address issues.
- The change requirement should be prioritized
Team members are prone to making late deliveries when they have a large list of tasks ahead of them. Phased priorities should be used by development teams to overcome delays in change management. As structural and transformation changes are more complex, they may restrict the execution of other changes, such as dependencies.
If the scope permits, you can also implement customer-centric and remedial changes alongside transformation and structural changes. Prioritizing changes is all about making sure one change does not create roadblocks for other changes. Sprint delays and restrictions can be prevented by prioritizing changes and defining their overall impact.
- Change Execution
After tasks are prioritized, the development team takes over and integrates the assigned changes. It is important for development teams to understand that not all changes will be executed in the expected timeline – some changes may require special handling.
Some changes may require special handling, and not all changes will be completed in the expected timeline. Development teams need to be aware of this. In case a change isn’t getting executed in runtime due to some difficulty, it’s better to reassess and move forward unless it’s critical or depends on other work to be started or completed.
- Quality Assurance Testing
QA testing can be conducted after the development phase is complete. A quality assurance test ensures that the software is error-free. During this stage, Salesforce application components, such as workflows, configurations, and features, are tested regressively with various loads and against different test cases to ensure that errors and vulnerabilities have been eliminated.
To migrate code for testing, the quality assurance team maintains sandboxes (and even partial sandboxes). Testing is performed on various components (primarily where changes are executed), performance is monitored, and bug reports are created.
Check out some of the testing methods that come under QA Testing:
Integration Testing: Different programmers code different software modules for this type of Salesforce testing. Post-integration tests are used in change management to expose any defects.
Functional Testing: Salesforce QA teams validate the application against the functional requirements and specifications.
Since changes are done in the Salesforce platform, functional testing methods are regressively performed on the components where change has impacted workflow in a certain way.
Load Testing: During load testing, the performance of a system is evaluated under a specific load. The test team examines how Salesforce behaves when multiple users access the system at the same time.
Security Testing: An important part of the QA checklist is security testing. Change execution is assessed for threats, vulnerabilities, and risks. There are several reasons why you should conduct security tests in Salesforce, such as cyber-attacks and unauthorized intrusions.
- Tests of user acceptance
Following the testing and fixing of bugs by the QA team, user acceptance testing begins. As well as developers and testing professionals, end users are included in this testing phase. To determine if the changes meet users’ expectations, a partial sandbox environment is used for testing navigation, component usage, and other aspects.
- Deployment and Training
Changes should be tested by developers and end users before being transferred. The development team usually transfers these changes through change sets or any third-party change management tool like InsideBoard App or Account Optimizer, simplifying changes for end users.
Teams should consider onboarding professionals to train them and update them on the changes. Changes are usually transferred through change sets or third-party change management tools like InsideBoard App and Account Optimizer.
