Top 3 Causes that Drive Achievement Failure (and what to do about it)

Most Financial Services organizations leverage Salesforce.  Yet, many fail to achieve their intended business objectives.  Over the past 15+ years, I’ve had the opportunity to assist many clients that have faced these challenges.  This post introduces the topic by outlining the Top 3 causes and offers a few helpful concepts for each.

1. Vision

   
   

   Vision problems stem from either an undefined Vision or one that hasn't been fully understood by the Executives in the company.

   
   

   In the event the Vision is undefined, downstream artifacts will be compromised resulting in either poor architecture or mission creep or both. Poorly architecture will result in ongoing higher costs, longer project durations and, in some cases, prevent realization of future business objectives barring a reimplementation. Mission creep results in either project overruns or scope tradeoffs that result in lower value per dollar.

   
   

   A Vision that doesn't have proper buyin frequently results in a project or program being truncated prior to its originally intended conclusion as some of the Executives realize the Project or Program is delivering a different set of outcomes than they originally thought. While this ultimately results in financial impacts, the often the employee impact is more consequential. This is highly demoralizing to the employees that have been involved and tarnishes trust in the Executive team.

   
   

   In either case, the remedy is to revisit the Vision creation process, including the full Executive team, to either create or revise the Vision. This will result in a revised Project Plan or Roadmap and a review of the documents by the Executive team. As an aside, this documentation should be more that a GANTT chart. It should include current, transitional (if a Roadmap), and target state articulation for how it will impact the business, including Measurables and Persona Impact after major releases. Including this level of depth is required to ensure there is clarity. Including the Executives in the creation and ratification process will help to ensure full alignment.

   
   

2. Adoption

   
   

   Adoption issues are the result of enterprise communication patterns.

   
   

   Most frequently, a project's scope was created without consulting the users about their needs. The resulting project is feature rich with items management and/or compliance needs, but the result on the user is a perceived increase in work effort to enter data or track activity without a material improvement in their workload or performance. Given the nature of this feature set, it is required for the project, however, if a project results in a system no one uses, then the project should have not been funded. By asking for user input on feature set, including some of those features in the project scope, and communicating when features may be delivered after the project, the end users can view the project as something that will help them.

   
   

   Less frequently, adoption issues are a result of incomplete training. Salesforce has a very robust training catalog available to the public in the form of Trailhead. And while Trailhead offers a low cost, highly scalable option for platform features, it isn't customized to your specific personas or business processes. Trailhead should be supplemented with training, targeted by persona, addressing key features that were configured or coded during the project. Often, effectiveness can be increased if the persona specific training is packaged also as small video clips that can be easily consumed when the user has questions.

   
   

3. Governance

   
   

   Governance issues typically manifest after the first major release has been deployed and are a result of the Governance structure not balancing speed and safety. There is no one size fits all approach to Salesforce Governance, however, it should maximize the change velocity while ensuring safety.

   
   

   Most often, companies try to govern Salesforce the same as other major IT platforms, resulting in centralized IT teams and processes that maximize safety, but result in slow change velocity. Eventually, the business areas will not see the value from the platform. Sometimes this results in the business bypassing IT and bringing in consultants or other IT assets outside of the corporate norms.

   
   

   Less frequently, companies will establish a Salesforce implementation without traditional IT controls. This is becoming less common as most implementations include features that require integrations and those integrations are governed by traditional IT controls. In this situation, its typical to have changes to the production environment result in negative business operation impacts. Making changes in production, deploying with incomplete testing, limited or no user training, etc increase the risk of a business disruption.

   
   

   In either situation, the remedy is the same. Business and IT Leaders should sponsor an alignment exercise between speed and safety. This exercise should group various types of Salesforce changes into segments. Then align each change segment to the appropriate team (Business or IT), change request intake process, prioritization, design review, testing, training and deployment processes. Meeting cadences, attendees, agendas and identifying who is accountable for the new structure is also required.

Fortunately, Platinum River Innovations can assist. Our modular consulting process is designed to solve these problems. Please contact us to schedule a free 30 minute consultation.