How we reduce risk on your Salesforce projects

At Nubik, we take a measured approach to staffing before a Salesforce project even gets out of the gate. By putting the right person on the right task, projects get done faster and with higher quality. But how do you know who the right person is? Let’s break it down with a little help from Kayla Cifola, Resource Manager at Nubik. 

Breaking it down

It all starts with mapping out your company’s resources, says Kayla. By getting a big-picture overview of staff, their skills and certifications, their specializations, and their level of expertise, it becomes a lot easier to delegate resources appropriately – all while maintaining quality. 

Classifying resources can take different shapes, but Kayla recommends taking note of a few specific qualifications. There are the obvious ones:

• Their level of expertise and experience with various products
• Their specialization
• Their certifications

And there are ones you may not have considered, but will go a long way for creating a consistent and high-quality experience for clients, customers and other employees:

• Their native language
• Their location and time zone
• The recency and status of their certifications

When you layer all of these details together, patterns start to emerge – it becomes easy to decide, at a glance, who should work on what, who should be available as a backup, and who is best suited to communicate with a given client. There’s no more scrambling to find someone to take on a particular task; with everything defined, all you have to do is follow the process. You’ll also know right away what kind of a timeline you can promise to a client since you know exactly who’s available, what is their expertise, and how quickly they can get started on a new project. 

The process that emerges from this type of documentation might look something like this:

1. Assess the full scope of needs for your Salesforce project
2. Cross-reference the list of resources to find the right person to lead the project, based on expertise, experience, and soft skills (like speaking the clients’ native language)
3. Identify a backup for that person whose expertise matches the project’s needs
4. Match the project lead(s) with support staff who have the right training and expertise to fill in any gaps and avoid downtime
5. Get started!

By reducing downtime, you reduce extraneous expenses, project inconsistencies, loss of information, and – you guessed it – risk. Mitigating this risk has obvious benefits, like reducing Total Cost of Ownership and streamlining the integration process, which saves you time and money.

Without adequate documentation, the process is probably more like:

1. Assess the full scope of needs for your Salesforce project
2. Ask around for someone who isn’t busy, and who can handle this type of project
3. Find out they were actually promised to another department starting next week
4. Back to step 1
5. Repeat every time someone is sick, out on parental leave, or leaves for a competitor 

Other benefits of mapping out skills and certifications

There’s another major benefit to operating with structure and efficiency, which should be everyone’s #1 priority anyway – employee satisfaction. As we all know, happy employees do the best work. They also stay in organizations for longer. This helps preserve legacy knowledge within the company, making it faster and easier to deliver effective solutions.

Knowing your employees inside and out makes everything easier, faster, and more efficient – and more fun, too. So why not apply that logic to other areas of your organization? You wouldn’t jump into a software development project without clearly defining a process. Nor should you jump into a Salesforce project (or anything else, for that matter) without mapping out how to use your internal resources in the best way possible.

So before you embark on your next big Salesforce implementation, whether that’s alone or with a consulting partner, consider taking the time to map out your resources first. You’ll be glad you did. 

For more information about our Salesforce implementation services, and how we can help streamline your next project, get in touch right here.