How to track your Salesforce project’s success and what to expect when engaging with Perficient as your Salesforce implementation partner on a weekly basis.
Great news – your organization just purchased Salesforce and now you’re looking for a Salesforce partner and team of consulting experts, like Perficient, to support your team’s implementation. Whether it is a Service Cloud rollout to 5,000 service agents or a Sales Cloud for your startup team of ten, it’s our job to help organizations just like yours enable customer success with Salesforce. How exactly do we ensure success? Our proven methodology has stood the test of time on more than 3,000 engagements with Perficient’s Salesforce team when tracking projects. This approach includes:
- Early planning and establishing budgets to define the overall project parameters and business outcomes desired
- Weekly check-ins that support the project progress and identifying risks that will be actively managed
- Closure reports and ongoing project support that help identify where KPIs were met and exceeded
Focusing on weekly check-ins, we often find clients want to know what exactly will be tracked and what we do to internally assure our projects are successful, so let’s take a closer look.
Overall Health and Summary
Every weekly project report starts with our internal Stoplight meeting. The Perficient Salesforce project managers meet to discuss all projects under their purview and update each other on their current status (using a red, yellow, and green approach to quickly identify any risks). From there the project manager will create a weekly report which includes all of the relevant facts about the project but focuses, at a high-level, on the overall health, using the same red, yellow, and green identifiers. This high-level understanding provides everyone on the project team a quick view on how the project is doing and allows for focused discussions on those areas that need it most.
Project Plan
We have a number of different methods of project planning your Salesforce implementation and work with our clients to identify the best method that suits your company’s approach to projects. We can create detailed plans which support integrated projects that span multiple business functions or technology platforms, and typically manage both internal and external staff. We can also create high-level plans which benefit project sponsors as well as steering groups. Plans will include task level activities, the completion dates and the responsible owner.
Budget Burn
We can track budget burns a number of ways (even ones that are only burning opportunity costs). Most customers want to understand how the forecasted spend is tracking against the current spend. We provide everything from detailed spreadsheets with week on week comparisons all the way through to simple summaries.
Risks and Issues
All projects have risks and issues, and we track these by doing the following:
- Raising the risk with your project manager or senior sponsor
- Assigning a score to the risk based on two factors – likelihood and impact
- Provide considered views on the potential mitigation strategies
Once the risks have been identified and accepted by the project team their statuses are tracked.
Actions, Decisions and Deliverables Tracker
Lastly, on some projects where the decision making may be dispersed throughout the organization and there are many stakeholders, it is worth using trackers which can be reviewed weekly or more often if required. The trackers for actions, decisions and deliverables should include at a minimum:
- Type and explanation of action/decision/deliverable
- Requestor
- Owner
- Status
- Raised / Completion Date
- Activities to Complete
Getting Salesforce Right
Consistency in how meetings are run and issues are recorded, having the proper tools and framework, as well as a focus on achieving business outcome all have a direct impact on the overall success of a Salesforce project. I hope this view into the day in the life of a Perficient project manager gives you a sense for what it takes to successfully manage a project, and why our more than 450 clients have entrusted us with their Salesforce implementations.
