As I was talking to my mentor, she suggested a great idea to start blogging about some project pitfalls that I’ve
encountered. As a project manager at Cloud Sherpas, I would like to say I have seen everything, but clients continue to amaze me with each and every new project I lead! One of my favorite project scenarios is the one that I decided to begin this series with, Fear of Going Live.
Fear of Going Live, FoGL for short, is a condition that makes mature organizations become frightful of deploying their initial Salesforce solution. Before anyone starts to panic, FoGL is not contagious or terminal! There are proven non-drug therapies to treat and cure if it is caught early enough! Treatment can save an organization a considerable amount of money, time, headaches, and heart aches upon initial implementation. I am going to quickly break down the symptoms of FoGL and then I will list out the treatment. These are proven methods that have been tested and put through special clinical trials. So basically, trust me!
Symptoms of FoGL:
If you’ve experienced FoGL in any way, some of these may sound familiar to you..
- Requesting project extensions to elongate the QA or UAT test cycles
- Bringing a significant amount of additional people into testing to ensure that absolutely NO DETAIL has been missed (this is usually seen when the client is doing a “lift & shift” from an old system to Salesforce – more to come on the perils of the lift & shift)
- Not trusting earlier requirements/user stories and continuously raising defects that are essentially, new requirements
- Believing that everything needs to absolutely perfect for go live because users will not user the system as they will not trust it
- Not understanding that a Salesforce implementation should be an evolution out of basic requirements with room to scale
Causes of FoGL:
- Lack of Change Management efforts, including change agents/champions and a proper communication plan
- Not reviewing As Is processes to align with new To Be processes within Salesforce (retiring legacy processes)
- Not bringing key business participation into the project early on so that the following occurs:
- Poorly documented user stories without key business participation
- Lack of input from key process owners
- Validation of requirements and acceptance criteria from the business
- Lift & Shift Syndrome
When helping clients or your own organization implement Salesforce, whether it’s Sales cloud or Service cloud, be aware of signs of FoGL. Making sure that due diligence is performed from the beginning to ensure all requirements have been captured into actionable user stories that align with new To Be processes to achieve business objectives are key. Do your part to stop FoGL and ensure a successful implementation.
Happy Go Lives make the Best Go Lives! (cheesy.. I know! )
Force of Anarchy 