Janeen Marquardt, MBA, PMP

Losing sight of the “Big Picture” while implementing Salesforce Current technologies such as Salesforce are highly flexible, user-friendly, and relatively inexpensive, which can foster rapid and unplanned changes. While managing Salesforce projects, it is tempting to implement minor changes quickly under the assumption that they will not significantly impact the project or incur additional costs. However, 95% of these seemingly small changes cumulatively result in significant time expenditures, ultimately increasing the overall project cost and causing budget overruns or missed deadlines. To illustrate, consider a scenario with 200 minor changes, each taking an average of one hour. This results in an additional 200 hours, equating to more than one month of work for a single resource. Assuming a blended rate of $200 per hour, this adds $40,000 to the project. Although this amount may seem minor, for smaller companies with limited budgets, it could jeopardize the entire program. For larger projects, $40,000 could escalate to $400,000 or even $4 million, attracting leadership's attention, and potentially derailing the entire initiative. The solution lies in adhering to a few straightforward steps: 1.     Define the “Big Picture” and ultimate goal (Vision, Primordial Directive): ·       "Modernize all internal platforms to grow with the business, enable communication with external systems from vendors, partners, resellers, retailers, franchisees, distributors, and customers, and facilitate insights, trends, and additional revenue channels to increase business profitability." ·       Continuously update the vision. 2.     Break down the “Big Picture” into smaller components within a timeline (Roadmap): ·       Continuously monitor changes in business, technology, and customer needs to ensure the roadmap remains current. 3.     Establish clear roadmap stages, defined by time, objectives, and feature values: ·       Set clear metrics and goals. For example, if your company must migrate to a new system because the old one will be unsupported by year X, ensure the new system is operational by that date or earlier to mitigate risks. By documenting this, you are developing a framework which will enable you to compare and evaluate every single user story, requirement, change, defect, use case, feature, epic, system, platform, project, or program to ensure alignment with the “Big Picture”: ·       If a request does not contribute to building the big picture and meeting current stage objectives, deprioritize it for a future stage or remove it from consideration altogether from this program; however, keep in mind that this could be the seed of your next big initiative. In summary, any action, plan, or request that does not contribute to the primordial directive should not receive investment in terms of time or resources.

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