How do you know if your Salesforce implementation is evolving in alignment with your business? As you change your organizational structure, scale, processes and priorities, has your software been kept in lockstep? Just as we need to keep a pulse on the business, it is important to keep tabs on the health of your Salesforce implementation.

You made an investment with the intention of enabling your business. While you may have had Salesforce for a long time and it may be working well for you, you still want to ensure that your investment is reaping returns leading to effective sales processes, automated business processes and insights into key metrics.

But how will your organization get tangible gains if your processes are not coupled with technology to drive results? Here are steps to ensure that you are assessing current state, planning for the future and evolving to embrace innovation.

Step 1:  Design

Does your original implementation align with your rapidly-changing company and business initiatives? Salesforce offers you the ability to configure various components- data, metadata and infrastructure. This configurability is a powerful lever to shape the technical layout to match your business needs. Some key questions you want to ask during this phase are:

-        As your business scales, what is the optimal number of orgs needed to meet goals?

-        How will you roll out Salesforce across business units?

-        Will you have global deployments?

-        How will the information flow between orgs?

-        Will you need to migrate from multiple orgs into a single org?

Our Org Strategy Accelerator will help you answer all these questions as well provide best practice recommendations on migration plans.

Step 2:  Measure

In order to keep up with changing demands, you take up new initiatives and projects. In order to improve the performance and enhance the functionalities, you want to assess where you stand in terms of technical debt. Here are some key questions you want to ask in this phase:

-        Are end users logging in and using Salesforce as expected?

-        How much have you customized Salesforce?

-        How long are your deployments or migrations taking?

-        Have you observed a delay in response time for queries, reports or dashboards?

-        Is your custom code efficient and scalable?

We have a Salesforce Org Health assessment accelerator that will not only provide insights into these and other key performance metrics, but will also share recommendations on how to improve the metrics that are important to you.

Step 3:  Manage

Successful Salesforce implementations are a result of a strong framework to support appropriate structure, accountability and visibility to make good decisions.  As your organization evolves, Salesforce enables you to maximize its effectiveness.

There are multiple facets adding to the complexity of effectively managing Salesforce – program management, change management, release management, development environment management and alignment between IT and business are just few of the examples.

To move from chaotic to a very controlled and holistic process management, ask yourself the following questions:

-        Are the key stakeholders aligned with IT?

-        Do you have a clearly defined and well-documented development, release, maintenance and training cycle?

-        How do you gather feedback to make sure the initiatives align with priorities?

-        What risk mitigation processes have you defined at every stage of software development lifecycle?

Our Introduction to Governance accelerator is designed to answer all these questions while guiding you to take your implementation to the next level.

Step 4: Optimize

The more integrated Salesforce becomes to your business processes, the more you will benefit from a formalized solution governance model -- one that enables innovation and agility. Designing a Center of Excellence drives cost saving by using standardized best practices and helps mitigate risks through gap analysis.

Some key considerations to take into account as you move towards optimizing performance are:

-        Are you maximizing the return on investment in Salesforce?

-        Do you have a significant backlog of business requests stuck with IT teams? If yes, have you done a root cause analysis to investigate the cause?

-        Are IT and business stakeholders able to effectively prioritize requests?

-        With the current resources and complexity in your org, will you be able to scale to meet business demand?

The Design a Center of Excellence as well as Salesforce Architecture Assessment accelerator will address all the key concerns raised in the questions above. Setting a roadmap for developing a center of excellence and a charter for long term goals and plans will be two of the key deliverables with these engagements.