An overview of the pre-development phase of your Salesforce project

Each phase of a Salesforce project has its own set of key milestones, along with activities to reach the milestones.

Let’s get started with key milestones of the first phase of your Salesforce project.

Key milestones of the pre-development phase

The pre-development phase of your Salesforce project starts at inception. Inception is defined as the point where your company has made a choice of technology from a range of CRM providers, and Salesforce has been chosen as your future CRM platform. Deciding on a CRM provider is outside the scope of this book.

The key milestones of the pre-development phase are securing an initial budget for your Salesforce implementation and contracting with Salesforce Inc., and most often an implementation partner, to assist you in the development and roll-out of your solution.

To reach these milestones, several activities are required. We will go over these activities in the next section.

Activities in the pre-development phase

The activities in the pre-development phase of your Salesforce project are illustrated in the following figure:

Figure 1.2 – Activities in the pre-development phase

There are two key points to note from Figure 1.2:

• Each activity in the pre-development phase is covered by a chapter in this book, so you can easily navigate to the part you want to dive into.
• There are no arrows in the diagram. While the order of the activities generally means you should go clockwise through the process, it is not always the case. We will come back to this point in the Iterating in the pre-development phase section of this chapter.

Now that we have established what the overall activities consist of in the pre-development phase, let’s look at who will be performing the activities.

Introducing the Salesforce taskforce

To carry out the activities in the pre-development phase, the executive sponsor of the Salesforce implementation should create a Salesforce taskforce.

The Salesforce taskforce should consist of three key roles, with representatives from the business organization, the IT organization, and your Project Management Office (PMO). Finally, the Salesforce taskforce must have an executive sponsor.

The roles and responsibilities of each member are described in Table 1.1:

Taskforce member role	Taskforce member responsibilities
Business owner	Lead the analysis of the company’s strategic situation Determine required business capabilities Determine business KPIs to measure the success of the project
Tech owner	Based on the required business capabilities, determine high-level target technical scope Ensure target technical scope aligns with enterprise architecture principles and plans
PMO representative	Taskforce project management Stakeholder management Set meetings with internal and external stakeholders, capturing minutes and actions Set and schedule taskforce meeting cadence, and report to the executive sponsor Escalate issues and decisions not able to be taken by the taskforce
Executive sponsor	Support and coach taskforce Act as an escalation point

Table 1.1 – The responsibilities of taskforce member roles

Duration of the pre-development phase

During the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, some companies realized their imperative to change was urgent and turned around all the activities in the pre-development phase in a matter of a few weeks. While it may have rescued small- and medium-sized businesses in exposed industries, you should not rush through this phase.

The solid preparation and organizational alignment work done in the pre-development phase will make your Salesforce project more robust and have a greater chance for success, compared to a rushed pre-development phase.

Let’s continue to the next section where we will uncover your company’s need for change.