5 Steps to Documenting Process

  • Presenter is Melissa VanDyke, manager of Salesforce team at Orbitz Worldwide in hospitality industry
  • Requests to admins always start with “Is it possible to…”, and admins' response is generally “Yea, we can do it.” But internally admins are generally squirming/panicking. Admins can generally figure it out, but the path from A to B can be a bit convoluted and nonlinear.
  • Purpose of this presentation is to give you a methodology for implementing a new process into Salesforce from a documentation and requirements gathering perspective
    • This methodology helps to prevent the panic step

  • These steps are appropriate for large updates to Salesforce that could accurately be described as a “Project” - simple change requests do not need all this documentation

Step 1: Personas Identified (Gather the Troops)

  • Identify the business owner(s) and subject matter expert(s) (person currently working the current process), which may be people from multiple departments, and executive sponsor

Step 2: Plan the Kickoff Meeting (Set Expectations)

  • Write an Agenda for the meeting
  • Schedule the kick-off meeting
  • Include the agenda/plan in the invite to set expectations
  • Start the meeting by explaining that you are there to help them solve this problem, and to do that you must know what they know about their process

Step 3: Document Current State (Mind your PB&Js)

  • During the kickoff meeting, keep track of PB&Js:
    • Personas (Troops):
      • SME vs Super User
      • Business Owner vs Executive Sponsor
      • Example: Business owners/SMEs might be a “Revenue Management Manager” or a “Sales Director,” each of whom would likely bring one or more super users (people actually doing the work) to the meeting
    • Bombs (user pain about the process):
      • Lots of work-around processes
      • Lots of pain and spinning of wheels
      • Represent bigger process issues that need to be talked about
      • Major use-case user pain we are designing for
      • Example: Sales Team Pain - 3 email addresses to keep track of, losing track of pending request status, no visibility/summary history, significant email churn
    • Jams (Salesforce Platform):
      • Workflow Rules with Email Alerts/Field Updates
      • Formula fields (to display “action items” on a report)
      • Any automation/functionality you can build easily
      • A solution we can implement easily as we go because it is readily available on Salesforce
      • Example: RM Team Pain - no visibility/status history, SLA tracking is impossible, I need reports and dashboards
      • Example: knowledge transfer when people leave the company, new reps have to spend a lot of time digging through files, knowledge loss since much was in emails
      • Example: need to notify a different department when a task is complete, which can fall through the cracks because it is a manual process
  • After kickoff meeting, document the current state then send via email for review

  • Example of a documented process shown above, presenter creates these documents in PowerPoint
  • Next:
    • Gather feedback if any and adjust as necessary until everyone is aligned
    • Gather field/validation rule requirements and examples of current requests to get started

Step 4: Proposed Future State (Ideal State)

  • Next, create documents about the proposed future state:
    • Define the ideal future state
    • Identify the best way to improve existing process
    • Clean up the bombs and jams with Salesforce functionality

Step 5: Planning and Approvals (Trade-offs and Buy-in)

  • Next, finalize the scope and ensure alignment:
    • Follow through and follow up
    • Communicate expectations of deliverables and timing (what will get done by when)
    • Make sure you have buy-in
    • Keep communicating during the build process