3D Delivery- Three Simple Measures of Success

The complexity of Salesforce projects can make it easy to lose sight of what good delivery looks like. What are we striving for? What are our measures of success and how do we know that we have arrived?

For this, we can keep it simple. As one of my clients (a successful delivery director) explained, project success can be measured simply by three things: Dates, Dollars and Deliverables. These we can track, measure and work towards, and everyone on the team can understand what success looks like. Let’s look at each factor:

Dates: What is our timeline? Overall and incremental? Do we have milestones that will help to keep us on track? Are any of our milestones slipping? By defining our overall timeline (macro timeline) and our detailed timeline (micro timeline), we can layout a game plan for achieving our dates. For example, a project roadmap with swim-lanes for each major workstream can provide our macro timeline. A detailed sprint map, with Epics and User Stories tell us what we are working on every two to three weeks. If all major activities are accounted for in our timeline, we will have a much greater chance of meeting our dates. These timelines should be shared widely with the delivery team and stakeholders to align everyone to the project timeline.

Dollars: As with dates, we can look at our project budget and burndown on two levels. First is our overall project budget which shows our spend plan for the project and allows us to communicate with project leadership. Tracking budget for internal resources, contractors, and other costs as separate categories enables us to identify potential problem areas more specifically, and how project burn is (or is not) reflective of the plan. Additionally, tracking budget at the individual resource level, by week or month, allows us to see how certain resources are doing. What is the spend on project management, architecture, development, quality assurance, etc.? Is our development taking more effort than we had anticipated? Why? And what can we do to ensure that we remain on target? Looking at our budget at this detailed level can help us see challenges and pick up on early warning signals, while there is still time to adjust.

Deliverables: Finally, the goal of every project is do deliver something of value to the client. Deliverables are the tangible, specific things that help our client transform their business. Deliverables are not time, resources, or activities. They are clearly defined outcomes. For example, a Sales Cloud implementation, for 1,000 users, with lead capture, three opportunity workflows, 2 integrations, and data migration from a legacy system, that all works well. Deliverables are defined in our scope, Epics and User Stories.

In addition to the tangible ‘stuff’ of deliverables, I would add adoption. Thinking of adoption as a deliverable helps to galvanize the delivery team and focus efforts on delivering technology (and processes) that really work for the client. This helps to ensure quality and product fit for the project, and focuses the delivery team’s effort on extremely useful, functional technology.

In summary, project success can be expressed simply by achieving targets in Dates, Dollars and Deliverables (and doing it really well). These are clear measures that the delivery team and stakeholders can rally around, and they can serve as a compass for the team.

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