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Project Management Office
Customer Vision & Roadmap
Review the 7 Domains of Success for both Strategy and roadmap to identify best practices and how to achieve them.
Create and publish a firm 6-month roadmap and softer 12-18 month list of features/integrations to deploy including the title, short description, priority, business owner, Admin team owner, dev/testing/training/deployment dates, etc.
As you begin to define and formalize key business goals and KPIs, it is important to map them to Salesforce capabilities and an implementation timeline. Hence, the overall roadmap should be reassessed and updated as these business goals/KPIs are defined.
Roadmap and roadmaking tools
- 7 Domains of Success (Domain 5 – Roadmap) (Slide Deck)
- Prodpad, Roadmunk, Wizeline
Governance
- 7 Domains of Success (Domain 4 – Sponsorship and Governance) (Slide Deck)
- Salesforce Governance Framework (Guide / White Paper)
- Transforming IT into a Business Driver (White Paper)
- How to Succeed at Project Governance (Article)
- Executive Sponsorship is Key for Salesforce Implementations (Article)
- Intro to Governance (Accelerator)
- Design a Center of Excellence (Accelerator)
Change Management
- Bring Order to Chaos with Governance and Change Management Processes (Blog)
- How to Succeed at Project Governance (Article)
- Best Practice for Administrators (Guide)
- 9 Steps to Effective Change Management (Article)
- 10 Principles of Change Management (External Article)
Waterfall and Agile project management processes
Benefits of the Agile process
Why Agile?
In consulting work, we often find that the final outcome of a project is more of a work in progress and the path to get there is iterative, meaning it requires a process of repetitive steps that deliver results little by little. In work like this, the Agile process of project management comes in handy.
Agile is the umbrella term for various technical practices, principles, and values that call for flexibility with workflows and iterative changes to the product. People often think Agile is only used for software development projects, but project managers actually use Agile techniques for all sorts of project types, especially in consulting.
Sometimes project managers use another project management process, called Waterfall. This is a less flexible process in which everything is planned upfront, and each step must be completed before moving on. It’s often used when the outcome or deliverable is set in stone.
Which process you choose depends on what you know—or don’t know—when you start the project.
Plan vs. Adapt
If you’re trying to decide which process works best for you, consider this: If you’re painting a picture, and you’ve decided on your colors, your setting, how much time you’ll spend painting, and what your final piece will look like, then you’ve made little room to make changes along the way. That's not to say the painting won’t be a Picasso, but your process isn’t set up to incorporate new ideas or feedback that can change the final image (for the better, of course). That’s when you might use the Waterfall approach.
But when you paint iteratively, you can expect to make changes based on early feedback, new ideas, or even new learnings (those colors clash!) rather than painting in a planned, incremental, order. That’s the Agile approach.
Agile Fundamentals
Acceptance criteria
The conditions a product or project must satisfy to be accepted by a user, customer, or other stakeholders.
Backlog
A list of activities a team may deliver in order to achieve a specific outcome. It’s the single source for things a team works on. If it isn’t in the backlog, it doesn’t happen. Conversely, if it’s on the backlog, this doesn’t guarantee it gets delivered.
Backlog refinement
The activity of refining the backlog on a regular basis to ensure it contains the appropriate items, that they’re prioritized, and that they’re in a state of readiness to move forward.
Definition of done
A set of guidelines dictate everything a team is required to do before they call the work truly done.
Iterative development
Agile projects intentionally allow for repeating activities and for potentially revisiting the same work products.
Minimum viable product (MVP)
The version of the deliverable allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validation with the least amount of effort.
Product owner
The role is responsible for making sure the team delivers the desired outcome.
Scrum
A type of Agile process with defined roles, meetings, and deliverables that provides the structure to deliver high-quality value to customers faster.
Scrum master
The role that’s responsible for making sure the team follows Agile principles, along with any practices they agree on.
Sprint
A sprint is a fixed time period for a continuous development cycle. Within a sprint, a planned amount of work has to be completed by the team and made ready for review.
Sprint planning
An event at the beginning of a sprint when teams determine the items to work on during that sprint.
User stories
Work divided up into functional increments.
Concepts and framework
Front Office Process Tower Framework
The Front Office is where revenue is directly generated for your company, so ensuring you have a good process for it is important. As with anything, developing a strategy is key to success. Whether you’re a new business or an existing one, get to know your market and develop a business strategy around it. Analyze the current market, gather business intelligence, and look into marketing programs such as Partnership Growth Program or SPIFF, where salespeople are immediately rewarded through bonuses for sales.
With your business strategy developed, it is time to really delve into marketing. To make sales, customers need to know that you’re an option. Get the word out there through a marketing campaign. Advertise your business through the web, TV or radio, attend trade shows, launch email campaigns, and send mail to potential consumers. Once the word is out there, Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) should work to organize potential leads for the sales team.
Sales are next in the front office process. Use the leads that marketing has created and convert them into sales. Configure Price Quote software or CPQ, can be used to generate accurate quotes for potential customers in real-time, in order for a salesperson to have a quote readily available to convert a lead.
When a sale has been made, track that order using your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software. This will help the front office process by allowing salespeople to look at existing orders when trying to keep clients or convert new leads.
Executive Scorecard Framework
As an executive, you have goals and strategies you want to be met and followed. Measuring the performance of these goals and strategies can be achieved using an executive scorecard. First, split your goals into different areas of focus such as improving your company’s brand, tracking how well the company uses its budget, or how it uses opportunities.
In each area of focus, mark what goals or strategies were implemented in that area. For example, in the Opportunities focus area, your goal was to capture 100 leads and generate $1M in revenue. Then, compare the actual results of each year to your goal. Using these results for each goal, a grade can be created for a focus area. These grades show broadly how well the company meets its goals and follows through on its strategies.
Customer Touch Point Framework
Engaging with your customers helps build brand loyalty as well as change how they feel about your business or product. Having a variety of effective customer touchpoint methods is, therefore, necessary to improve public perception of your company, its products and its brands.
As a small or medium sized business there are a variety of ways to improve and add new customer touch points. Emails can be automated to welcome new users to your product or thank them for their purchase. They can also be sent as a reminder for to renew their subscription to your services, keeping your company on their mind.
As your business grows, scale up your touch points as well. Technology makes this easier than ever to connect with your customers. Use surveys to collect feedback to both give the customer a voice, which can make them feel more welcome as a customer, and to gain valuable insight into what consumers think.
Business Development Owner (BDO) Guideline
As a business development owner, you are tasked with identifying new business prospects, developing leads, contacting leads, and winning over new customers.
Generate prospects and group them into hot, warm or cold depending on how close the customer is to needing your business. A hot prospect will be in clear need of the service or product your company provides, such as having visited your website.
A cold prospect will not have had any with your company. Next, get in contact with those prospects and try to win them over as customers. Record all activities used to contact and win over customers and log your new customer in a tool such as Salesforce 1.