Preface
Salesforce has been ranked the #1 CRM provider for the last 9 consecutive years. In their fiscal quarter ending July 2022, Salesforce overtook SAP as the world’s largest provider of enterprise applications. Since its inception, Salesforce has expanded its initial sales domain-focused CRM offering by building and buying additional, complementary products – now spanning sales, e-commerce, service, field service, marketing automation, integration, RPA, analytics, AI, and much more.
With this huge growth and expansion, implementations of Salesforce have also seen a boom in business and technical complexity as well as organizational interconnectedness and dependencies, which all impact the way Salesforce projects and programs can be (and are being) delivered.
Literature is vast on Salesforce architecture and the technical aspects of developing Salesforce solutions (both with and without code), and there is no shortage of great implementation handbooks that cover one specific Salesforce cloud. Surprisingly, there is no book covering implementation lifecycle of a Salesforce project or program.
If your organization is going to invest – or already has invested – in Salesforce, you want to be sure to maximize the value from that investment. Value is unlocked when Salesforce is finetuned and adopted by your organization and is continuously delivering incremental value for your users and organization.
This book proposes a framework for how to approach Salesforce implementation projects and how to set your organization up to successfully manage a Salesforce program. Along the way, this book will provide you with insights into common issues and strategies to mitigate or prevent them altogether.
To be able to cover an arguably broad scope, this book is cross-functional and multi-dimensional. This means it covers many disciplines and domains without being a pure-play book on any one topic in particular.
The topics covered – all in a Salesforce context – include the following:
- Business architecture and strategy
- Enterprise architecture
- Salesforce architecture
- Project management
- Agile
- DevOps
- Governance
- Change management
- Program management
- Data management and analytics
- Product management
My hope is that this approach allows you to gain a holistic view of the nature of Salesforce projects and programs – without getting lost in the details.
By the end of this book, you will have gained the knowledge to be able to set Salesforce projects and programs up for success and deliver maximum value from investments.
