Governance Basics

Understand the Value of Governance

• What Is Governance?
  • Governance is a framework for how organizations operate and make decisions
    • From neighborhood HOA to developing complex software applications, governance is about the people and processes necessary to manage the organization and achieve good outcomes
  • This module focuses specifically on basic governance for modern technology teams
    • Governance frameworks for IT organizations have been in place since for half a century
  • Speed and simplicity of iterating on the Salesforce platform means governance is more important than ever
    • All technology organizations should have a governance framework in place no matter their size
• Why Is Governance Important for Technology Organizations?
  • Technology organizations and systems need governance for the same reasons cities have it. Examples:
    • Compliance: security and regulatory requirements that the systems must comply with, such as system access, security, and data privacy
    • Risk assessment: evaluating and managing risk, since companies are becoming more dependent on technology for their most important work
    • Cost efficiencies: organizations with a governance framework focus on things that provide the most value, which sets clear priorities and putting standardized processes in place. This helps technology teams maximize their limited resources and see cost savings as a result.
    • Velocity: technology moves fast, and companies need a means of deciding which new features or applications to invest in. Governance helps everyone agree on prioritization of new initiatives.
• A World Without Governance
  • When teams lack governance, they have no framework for making decisions, and entropy increases and desired outcomes suffer
• No Vision
  • All major technology projects should have a clearly defined vision statement and strategy that answers the question, “Why did your company purchase a Salesforce solution in the first place?”
• Lack of Alignment
  • Implementing and maintaining technology systems can involve many different teams - executives, project managers, and end users are all critical participants for success
  • When different groups are not in agreement on goals/deliverables for a project it can be disastrous.
    • Ex: a COO may believe the best way to increase profitability is to increase the efficiency of its operations, but maybe a CEO thinks that the company should focus more on turnkey solutions as they are the company’s most profitable product line. Imagine these turnkey solutions are very complex and run slowly when fully automated in Salesforce. Upon release in Salesforce, the sales team may find the latency issues in Salesforce unbearable and revert to having Sales Operations create their quotes instead of using the system.
• Low User Adoption
  • Salesforce is an investment - if users are not logging in and managing their work in the org, then the ROI on Salesforce will be poor
    • In the turnkey solutions example above, imagine the field sales team was not included and the new automations supporting turnkey solutions was not mobile compatible, so the field service team could not use it.
• Drowning in Enhancement Requests
  • After implementing a new system, user feedback inevitably starts. Ex:
    • Customer service director wants a new field on Account
    • Sales Operations is desperate for a new custom report type
    • Field service team is urgently requesting a new project management solution
    • All enhancements needed yesterday
  • How do you prioritize these competing needs?
    • If there’s no governance model in place, the result is frustrated business users and frazzled system admins
    • A solution can be a prioritized business backlog
    • One of the foundations of a lean governance framework is to collect enhancement requests in a transparent way so everyone can see and influence the roadmap
      
      
• Governance frameworks ensure that systems comply with necessary regulations and security requirements, and gives technology teams the flexibility to focus on the right things at the right time
• Governance frameworks improve end user satisfaction by ensuring that all stakeholders are represented in the implementation process so requirements are not missed

Learn Governance Roles and Responsibilities

• Introduction
  • This section focuses on implementing your own lean governance framework, outlining the people, teams, and skills needed
  • This provides a lightweight, flexible way to manage Salesforce environments and projects that increase your team’s ability to innovate and maximize investments
• Key Stakeholders - generally found in the following three groups
  • Information Technology: people who administer and develop your Salesforce instance
  • Business Units
    • Historically, technology teams viewed their relationship with business divisions through the lens of a customer - business needs something, then analysts gather requirements, technology team builds it based on those requirements
    • Now, that relationship isn’t collaborative enough, since things change too fast
    • A lean governance framework establishes a continuous partnership between technology teams and the people who run the rest of the business - this ongoing partnership is one of the most important aspects of the modern lean governance model
  • End Users: users are in the system every day and very close to the pertinent processes, generating valuable feedback that surprises business unit leaders and project teams
• Roles and Responsibilities
  • Business Unit People have to own the project vision and strategy, including being responsible for things like:
    • Gathering end-user feedback
    • Onboarding users
    • Owning and managing the budget
    • Designating a product owner
  • Technology team actually builds and maintains the system, including being responsible accurate estimates of effort for functionality the team needs, as well as:
    • Defining the release schedule
    • System testing
    • System support
• Required Skills
  • Anyone who’s involved in defining requirements, estimating effort, or building functionality in Salesforce needs to have a basic knowledge of the systems capabilities and limitations
    • All people on the project team, no just the IT team
    • Salesforce recommends starting with the following Trailhead trailmixes:
      • Admin Beginner
      • Admin Intermediate
      • Admin Advanced
      • Developer Beginner
  • Also important for Salesforce project teams to maintain and evolve their knowledge on the latest features and functionality - Salesforce unveils new capabilities three times per year to all customers
  • Salesforce strongly recommends that all system administrators and people on the implementation team earn Salesforce Certification credentials appropriate to their roles as well
    
    
• A business unit should be responsible for the vision and strategy for a Salesforce project because business users and leaders are in the best position to articulate their needs/prioritize the requirements
• Technology teams are not subject matter experts on the various business processes that will be affected by the project

Understand the Key Components of a Lean Governance Framework

• This section details key elements of a lean governance framework and how you can create one for your own organization
• Building Blocks of a Lean Governance Framework
  • In the old days of mainframes, IT projects had a complex governance structure due to all the necessary infrastructure
    • Building data centers, installing mainframes, writing code - all expensive and time-consuming tasks, so governance needed to be equally complicated
  • Salesforce advocates a lightweight governance structure to help customers deliver successful IT projects quickly, but under control
  • Five Key Processes to a lightweight, agile lean governance framework
    • Vision and Strategy
      • Every project needs a “north star” to guide all participants on a common path
        • Starting point for defining one is the project business case - for example, to increase profitability
      • Important to define a few measurable criteria (<= 5 total) to evaluate success. Examples:
        • Reduce average lead-to-cash duration on a turnkey system from 26 days to 6 days
        • Reduce the average time to generate a turkey system price quote from 3 days to 1 day
        • Reduce the percentage of turnkey system quotes that require Sales Ops assistance from 100% to 25%
      • Vision and strategy should be expressed in business terms, without mentioning any specific technology or system
      • Vision and strategy should be regularly reviewed and updated
    • Business backlog
      • Business backlog is a complete list of all business requirements, ordered by priority
        • Teams should maximize use of the platform’s declarative features and minimize need for custom code, which is more expensive to implement and maintain
      • Use the vision and strategy as your guide when working through the business backlog - the process is owned by the business units affected by the project (and definitely not a 3rd-party implementation team)
      • Business backlog should be dynamic and flexible, with a feedback mechanism from your users
    • Software development lifecycle
      • Establish some technical governance
        • Establish guidelines for the release cadence, migration of new functionality between environments, and quality assurance testing
        • Having consistency and guidelines for these things maximizes productivity and minimizes system instability
        • Develop methodologies that work for your company
    • Data strategy, architecture, and management
      • Data has become one of a company’s most vital, precious assets
      • When multiple systems generate information, there’s real insight to uncover by integrating the data
      • Data strategy is therefore a critical part of a lean governance framework
      • Formalize an integration strategy to ensure important data architecture decisions are considered holistically, with system integration in mind
    • Communication strategy
      • Mismanaged technology implementations cost organizations a great deal of money:
        • Root cause is nearly always poor communication:
          • Changing requirements
          • “Scope creep”
          • Cost overruns
          • Mutinous end users
      • Communications strategy is about ensuring everyone affected by a new project is informed and has a voice. Best practices:
        • Involve leadership: executives should lead the messaging
        • Mix it up: use things other than email and Chatter
        • Be mindful of noise: ensure your messages contain real value to the intended audience
        • What’s in it for me?: consider the perspective of the recipient - people are naturally resistant to the changes that Salesforce projects introduce
• Operating Model and Core Committees
  • Three basic options for Operating Models:
    • Centralized: single governance framework with one set of processes focused on a single BU, solution, or global process - best for smaller, single-org companies
    • Decentralized: federated governance framework with independent governance frameworks and possibility of different processes for different business units - best for organizations that have multiple Salesforce environments with autonomous business units or geographies
    • Hybrid: common governance framework with each business unit having its own autonomy - effective for larger companies that want to standardize best practices and processes under a common framework, but allow some autonomy for different divisions/geographies
  • The best operating model depends on:
    • Your development methodology: agile or waterfall?
    • Use of third-party partners: do you have a system integrator for some or all of your projects?
    • Company politics: if your company generally operates in a federated way, centralized governance may be a challenge
  • Core committees:
    • Executive Steering Committee
      • Owns the overall vision and strategy, sets the priorities, oversees the overall project budget
      • Final escalation point for disagreements
      • Membership should include key executive leaders across impacted BUs, IT, project management team
      • Should meet quarterly or more, depending on release cadence
      • Typical agenda:
        • Update on actions from last meeting
        • Review of project’s overall health and KPIs
        • Review and update the vision and strategy as required
        • Review project risk register
        • Discuss any other business
    • Project Management Committee
      • Manages the day-to-day details of all major projects
      • Should meet once per week with representatives from all key stakeholders in attendance
      • Suggested agenda:
        • Update on actions from last meeting
        • Review of projects' overall health and KPIs
        • Project resources and team skill requirements
        • Review of project risk register
        • Discuss any other business
    • Important that all these committee meetings are documented and published to all stakeholders
• A Path to Get Started
  • Start by forming key committees and formalizing vision and strategy
  • Tackle the business backlog for your projects
  • Start with modest goals, evaluate progress, then pivot as required
  • Listen to feedback
  • Later, tackle more complex processes like software development lifecycle and data strategy
    
    
• Key responsibilities of executive steering committee is Vision and Strategy and Project budget
• Great project vision statement: Improve the customer experience by radically reducing average wait time to reach our customer service agents