Topic: Preparing Solutions
Target Group: #JourneyToCTA
Complexity: Advanced
While the Salesforce ecosystem and the #journeyToCta is huge, it’s not unlimited. Furthermore, some requirements and solutions are just more common than others. Web2Lead, de-duplicating, or SSO are just a few examples. I am obsessed with preparing templated solutions for the most common requirements.
Doing many, many mocks, discussions, and real-life projects you start to see patterns of requirements. It’s possible to collect a list of a few hundred maybe low thousand common requirements and prepare solution templates for them.
Sure, you still have to adapt them to the specific scenario at hand, but the templates gets you 75% of the way for a specific requirement. Furthermore, it is much faster and safer. You know 75% of the solution should be correct.
I think it’s not enough to just know about the solution, I’d go out and prepare much more for each common requirement:
1) Solution options
2) Considerations
3) Implications on all areas of architecture starting from Org Strategy all the way to Governance
4) Spoken sentences
5) Shorthands for quick solutioning
6) Common key-words in requirements
Example:
A requirement like “Collect prospects from the website.” would become:
Note: “Lead W2L 300 flat FA DR COE no-DM”
Sentence – XXL-Long Form:
“In order to collect Prospects from the Website as Leads, I recommend using Web2Lead. I assume we have about 300 Leads per day without huge fluctuations. I considered FormAssembly. Integrating Web2Lead in the website can be a dependency risk with the website team we have to manage as part of the project plan. The website team should also become part of our COE. I see no need for Data Migration.”
I wouldn’t say the complete sentence in the review board, likely only the first part Having the full sentence prepared in my notes helps me for potential questions by the judges.
For areas I’m particularly weak in, I’d spend even more time preparing solution templates, I look at you, Governance!
I found, that strategy is not limited to the review board but has proven useful for my day-to-day job. For most new assignments I get I create detailed templates and prepare detailed solutions. You never know when they come in handy.
Disclaimer: I can’t stress enough how important it is to stay flexible and apply the templates to your specific requirements.
Homework:
Create 20 templates for the most common requirements.