Salesforce best practices: project management

Many clients we meet are really worried about the effectiveness of their project management practices. Whether you are investing in Salesforce to upgrade your current business processes or to automate your non-cloud procedures,  you want to be sure your project goes nice and smoothly.

Before you start any Salesforce implementation, the first and foremost thing you need to understand is why you need project management. Salesforce is highly configurable and flexible system but it doesn’t relieve you from the proper analysis of business needs and reasonable allocation of time and resources. In this article we’ll share the concept of three P’s to make your Salesforce project a success  – Planning, Procedures, People – followed by best practices to use them.

Planning

Paul J. Meyer once said, 

“Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort.”

Action without planning is a reason of every failure. No doubt that you expect their Salesforce projects to be implemented fast, cheap, and with high quality, so the only way these goals can be achieved is through the upfront planning. Talk to everyone involved, identify project needs, estimate risks and assumptions on the way to meet them, define the approach, and finally, create a  detailed plan that can be accomplished on time and under budget.

Processes

Among all the processes that run within project management phase we prefer to focus on the most effective ones: reactive planning, working in short cycles, continuous training, team improvement, timely feedback. That’s where Scrum appears onstage – a framework that keeps your team agile, allows you to adapt to constant change requirements and altering workflows  which is a perfect fit for Salesforce projects. What is more, even Salesforce.com itself sticks to agile development methodology.

People

Planning, procedures, methodologies, tools do really affect your project’s success but the role of the people working on the project is often underestimated. Meanwhile, communication remains the main reason why projects succeed or fail. To accelerate your communication processes, you can use internal Community (perfectly combined with Chatter). Moreover, Syntegrico’s best PM practices include informal non-work communication – the guys in the team appreciate to be addressed on a personal level. Discuss with your colleagues how their life is going and benefit from better involvement and collaboration!

…and for a bonus point:

Remember: No matter how well your plan is, you cannot guess what lies ahead. In unexpected situations you have to be sure everything is there and ready to go, so never fail to hire a talented PM  who keeps everyone motivated and moves the project forward.

Being a dedicated follower of the best project management practices, Syntegrico can boast of successfully completed projects in financial, education, non-profit, marketing, and other spheres. Contact us to start you journey toward effective project management.